Top 500 Franz Kafka Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “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

402. “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

403. “Martyrs do not underrate the body, they allow it to be elevated on the cross. In this they are at one with their antagonists.”

— Franz Kafka

404. “Anyone who loves his neighbor within the limits of the world is doing no more and no less injustice than someone who loves himself within the limits of the world.”

— Franz Kafka

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

— Franz Kafka

406. “How can one take delight in the world unless one flees to it for refuge?”

— Franz Kafka

407. “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

408. “Enlightenment comes to the most dull-witted. It begins around the eyes. From there it radiates.”

— Franz Kafka

409. “I am as I am, and that’s all there is to it, I can hardly take a pair of scissors to myself, and cut out a different person...”

— Franz Kafka

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

— Franz Kafka

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

— Franz Kafka

412. “The first thing he saw in the small room was a large clock on the wall which already showed ten o’clock.”

— Franz Kafka

413. “Logic is doubtless unshakable, but it cannot withstand a man who wants to go on living.”

— Franz Kafka

414. “Look at this, Willem, he admits he doesn’t know the law and at the same time insists he’s innocent.”

— Franz Kafka

415. “Towards the avoidance of a piece of verbal confusion: What is intended to be actively destroyed must first of all have been firmly grasped; what crumbles away crumbles away, but cannot be destroyed.”

— Franz Kafka

416. “Anyone who cannot cope with life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate... but with his other hand he can jot down what he sees among the ruins, for he sees different and more things than the others; after all, he is dead in his own lifetime and the real survivor.”

— Franz Kafka

417. “So eager are our people to obliterate the present.”

— 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. “There can be knowledge of the diabolical, but no belief in it, for more of the diabolical than there is does not exist.”

— Franz Kafka

420. “48 Belief in progress doesn’t mean belief in progress that has already occurred. That would not require belief.”

— Franz Kafka

421. “A man might find for a moment that he was unable to work, but that’s exactly the right time to remember his past accomplishments and to consider that later on, when the obstacles has been removed, he’s bound to work all the harder and more efficiently.”

— Franz Kafka

422. “All right then, I’ll be mad at you on this score, which incidentally is no great misfortune, as things balance out quite well if there’s a little anger for you lurking in one corner of my heart.”

— Franz Kafka

423. “Above all, he could not stop half way, that was nonsense not only in business but always and everywhere.”

— Franz Kafka

424. “Don’t be too hasty, don’t take somebody else’s opinion without testing it.”

— Franz Kafka

425. “Now, quite apart from the fact that the doors were locked, should he really call out for help? In spite of all his distress, he was unable to suppress a smile at this idea.”

— Franz Kafka

426. “I look a girl in the eye and it was a very long love story with thunder and kisses and lightning. I live fast.”

— Franz Kafka

427. “You can withdraw from the sufferings of the world – that possibility is open to you and accords with your nature – but perhaps that withdrawal is the only suffering you might be able to avoid.”

— Franz Kafka

428. “The fact that our task is exactly commensurate with our life gives it the appearance of being infinite.”

— Franz Kafka

429. “He had indeed been so close to forgetting that only the voice of the mother, so long unheard, brought him to his senses.”

— Franz Kafka

430. “I can’t hold enough of you in my hands.”

— Franz Kafka

431. “But I will write in spite of everything, absolutely; it is my struggle for self-preservation.”

— Franz Kafka

432. “Two possibilities: making oneself infinitely small or being so. The second is perfection, that is to say, inactivity, the first is beginning, that is to say, action.”

— Franz Kafka

433. “The moonlight lay everywhere with the natural peace that is granted to no other light.”

— Franz Kafka

434. “Was he an animal if music could captivate him so?”

— Franz Kafka

435. “One has just been sent out as a biblical dove, has found nothing green, and slips back into the darkness of the Ark.”

— Franz Kafka

436. “Nothing, you know, gives the body greater satisfaction than ordering people about, or at least believing in one’s ability to do so.”

— Franz Kafka

437. “When one has once accepted and absorbed Evil, it no longer demands to be believed.”

— Franz Kafka

438. “Sometimes I think I can expiate all my past and future sins through the aching of my bones.”

— Franz Kafka

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

— Franz Kafka

440. “Devilish in my innocence.”

— Franz Kafka

441. “Over the table, on which an unpacked line of fabric samples was all spread out – Samsa was a traveling salesman – hung the picture which he had recently cut out of a glossy magazine and lodged in a pretty gilt frame. It showed a lady done up in a fur hat and a fur boa, sitting upright and raising up against the viewer a heavy fur muff in which her whole forearm had disappeared.”

— Franz Kafka

442. “I was reading my destiny inside your eyes without knowing it.”

— Franz Kafka

443. “Deceptions are more frequent than changes.”

— Franz Kafka

444. “For a man under suspicion movement is better than rest, for the man who is at rest can always, without knowing it, be on the scales being weighed together with his sins.”

— Franz Kafka

445. “The experience of life consists of the experience which the spirit has of itself in matter and as matter, in mind and as mind, in emotion, as emotion, etc.”

— Franz Kafka

446. “You spend too much time on ephemeras. The majority of modern books are merely wavering reflections of the present. They disappear very quickly. You should read more old books. The classics. Goethe. What is merely new is the most transitory of all things. It is beautiful today, and tomorrow merely ludicrous.”

— Franz Kafka

447. “And I close my eyes to gaze into those depths, and am almost engulfed in you.”

— Franz Kafka

448. “Like tired dogs they stand there, because they use up all their strength in remaining upright in one’s memory.”

— Franz Kafka

449. “Oh, God”, he thought, “what a strenuous career it is that I’ve chosen! Travelling day in and day out. Doing business like this takes much more effort than doing your own business at home, and on top of that there’s the curse of travelling, worries about making train connections, bad and irregular food, contact with different people all the time so that you can never get to know anyone or become friendly with them. It can all go to Hell!”

— Franz Kafka

450. “When one has lived for thirty years in this world and had to fight one’s way through it, as I have had to do, one becomes hardened to surprises and doesn’t take them too seriously.”

— Franz Kafka