Top 500 Franz Kafka Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “But what if all the tranquility, all the comfort, all the contentment were now to come to a horrifying end?”

— Franz Kafka

402. “Was he an animal if music could captivate him so? It seemed to him that he was being shown the way to the unknown nourishment he had been yearning for.”

— Franz Kafka

403. “Evil is the starry sky of the Good.”

— Franz Kafka

404. “I have no literary interests; I am made of literature. I am nothing else and cannot be anything else.”

— Franz Kafka

405. “Kafka saw his tuberculosis as a liberation; interestingly, he called it “the animal.”

— Franz Kafka

406. “By imposing too great a responsibility, or rather, all responsibility, on yourself, you crush yourself.”

— Franz Kafka

407. “How many days have again gone silently by; today is 28 May. Have I not even the resolution to take this penholder, this piece of wood, in my hand every day? I really think I do not. I row, ride, swim, lie in the sun.”

— Franz Kafka

408. “There is infinite hope, but not for man.”

— Franz Kafka

409. “The whole visible world is perhaps nothing more than the rationalization of a man who wants to find peace for a moment.”

— Franz Kafka

410. “It is only our conception of time that makes us call the Last Judgement by this name. It is, in fact, a kind of martial law.”

— Franz Kafka

411. “In argument similes are like songs in love; they describe much, but prove nothing.”

— Franz Kafka

412. “Why was Gregor the only one condemned to work in a firm where, at the slightest lapse, someone immediately attracted the greatest suspicion?”

— Franz Kafka

413. “The man from the country has not expected such difficulties; the law, he thinks, should be accessible to everyone and at all times; but as he now takes a closer look at the doorkeeper in his fur coat, at his large pointed nose, his long, sparse, black Tartar beard, he decides that it is better, after all, to wait until he receives permission to enter.”

— Franz Kafka

414. “Books are a narcotic.”

— Franz Kafka

415. “If you come to me you will be leaping into the abyss.”

— Franz Kafka

416. “We are sinful not only because we have eaten of the Tree of Knowledge, but also because we have not yet eaten of the Tree of Life. The state in which we are is sinful, irrespective of guilt.”

— Franz Kafka

417. “Maybe innocence makes its way easiest through the elemental chaos of this world...”

— Franz Kafka

418. “And where do you see in all this the influence of the Castle?” asked K. “So far it doesn’t seem to have come in. What you’ve told me about is simply the ordinary senseless fear of the people, malicious pleasure in hurting a neighbor, specious friendship, things that can be found anywhere,...”

— Franz Kafka

419. “He remembered his family with deep feelings of love.”

— Franz Kafka

420. “Photography concentrates one’s eye on the superficial. For that reason it obscures the hidden life which glimmers through the outlines of things like a play of light and shade. One can’t catch that even with the sharpest lens.”

— Franz Kafka

421. “Every one of us has a bad conscience, which he tries to escape by going to sleep as quickly as possible.”

— Franz Kafka

422. “I am dead and despise anyone who isn’t.”

— Franz Kafka

423. “All the love in the world is useless when there is a total lack of understanding.”

— Franz Kafka

424. “A man doesn’t need to fly to the sun, he need only find a patch of clean earth, and crawl there, and let the sun shine on him.”

— Franz Kafka

425. “Torment yourself as little as possible, then you’ll torment me less.”

— Franz Kafka

426. “The history of the world, as it is written and handed down by word of mouth, often fails us completely; but man’s intuitive capacity, though it often misleads, does lead, does not ever abandon one.”

— Franz Kafka

427. “True undoubting is the teacher’s part, continual undoubting the part of the pupil.”

— Franz Kafka

428. “He looked sadly down at the street, as though it were his own bottomless sadness.”

— Franz Kafka

429. “My writing was all about you; all I did there, after all, was to bemoan what I could not bemoan upon your breast.”

— Franz Kafka

430. “16 February. Can’t see my way clear. As though everything I possessed had escaped me, and as though it would hardly satisfy me if it all returned.”

— Franz Kafka

431. “No, I didn’t imagine my being alone with you the way you do. If I want the impossible, I want it in its entirety. Entirely alone, dearest, I wanted us to be entirely alone on this earth, entirely alone under the sky, and to lead my life, my life that is yours, without distraction and with complete concentration, in you.”

— Franz Kafka

432. “His biggest misgiving came from his concern about the loud crash that was bound to occur and would probably create, if not terror, at least anxiety behind all the doors. But that would have to be risked.”

— Franz Kafka

433. “They did not know what we can now sense as we contemplate the course of history: that change begins in the soul before it shows in our lives...”

— Franz Kafka

434. “I didn’t want any new clothes at all; because if I had to look ugly anyway, I wanted to at least be comfortable. I let the awful clothes affect even my posture, walked around with my back bowed, my shoulders drooping, my hands and arms all over the place. I was afraid of mirrors, because they showed an inescapable ugliness.”

— Franz Kafka

435. “Atlas was permitted the opinion that he was at liberty, if he wished, to drop the Earth and creep away; but this opinion was all that he was permitted.”

— Franz Kafka

436. “I would be speaking even with my silence, because at the moment I am nothing but a single word.”

— Franz Kafka

437. “If I could drown in sleep as I drown in fear I would be no longer alive.”

— Franz Kafka

438. “If anything, his parables guarantee the failure not only of his characters, but of readers wishing to abstract any lessons applicable to their own lives. Failure, it seems, is Kafka’s true subject.”

— Franz Kafka

439. “First of all, the free man is superior to the bound man. Now the man is in fact free: he can go wherever he wishes, the entrance to the Law alone is denied to him, and this only by one person, the doorkeeper. If he sits on the stool at the side of the door and spends the rest of his life there, he does so of his own free will; the story mentions no element of force.”

— Franz Kafka

440. “And I leave my post of observation and find I have had enough of this outside life; I feel that there is nothing more that I can learn here, either now or at any time. And I long to say a last goodbye to everything up here, to go down into my burrow never to return again, let things take their course, and not try to retard them with my profitless vigils.”

— Franz Kafka

441. “For we are like tree trunks in the snow. In appearance they lie smoothly and a little push should be enough to set them rolling. No, it can’t be done, for they are firmly wedded to the ground. But see, even that is only appearance.”

— Franz Kafka

442. “The notion of the infinite expanse and copiousness of the cosmos is the result of the mixture, carried to the extreme limit, of laborious creation and free self-determination.”

— Franz Kafka

443. “Heaven is dumb, echoing only the dumb.”

— Franz Kafka

444. “I hope it is nothing serious. On the other hand, I must also say that we business people, luckily or unluckily, however one looks at it, very often simply have to overcome a slight indisposition for business reasons.”

— Franz Kafka

445. “They were offered the choice between becoming kings or the couriers of kings. The way children would, they all wanted to be couriers. Therefore there are only couriers who hurry about the world, shouting to each other – since there are no kings – messages that have become meaningless. They would like to put an end to this miserable life of theirs but they dare not because of their oaths of service.”

— Franz Kafka

446. “Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.”

— Franz Kafka

447. “In Paradise, as always: that which causes the sin and that which recognizes it for what it is are one. The clear conscience is Evil, which is so entirely victorious that it does not any longer consider the leap from left to right necessary.”

— Franz Kafka

448. “I won’t give up the diary again. I must hold on here, it is the only place I can.”

— Franz Kafka

449. “It’s sometimes quite astonishing that a single, average life is enough to encompass so much that it’s at all possible ever to have any success in one’s work here.”

— Franz Kafka

450. “My doubts stand in a circle around every word, I see them before I see the word, but what then! I do not see the word at all, I invent it.”

— Franz Kafka