Franz kafka Inspirational Quotes

They say ignorance is bliss.... they're wrong

It's only because of their stupidity that they're able to be so sure of themselves.

Isolation is a way to know ourselves.

I am free and that is why I am lost.

I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy.

I can’t think of any greater happiness than to be with you all the time, without interruption, endlessly, even though I feel that here in this world there’s no undisturbed place for our love, neither in the village nor anywhere else; and I dream of a grave, deep and narrow, where we could clasp each other in our arms as with clamps, and I would hide my face in you and you would hide your face in me, and nobody would ever see us any more.

The man in ecstasy and the man drowning: both raise their arms.

They're talking about things of which they don't have the slightest understanding, anyway. It's only because of their stupidity that they're able to be so sure of themselves.

Association with human beings lures one into self-observation.

There are times when I am convinced I am unfit for any human relationship.

Slept, awoke, slept, awoke, miserable life.

My peers, lately, have found companionship through means of intoxication - it makes them sociable. I, however, cannot force myself to use drugs to cheat on my loneliness - it is all that I have - and when the drugs and alcohol dissipate, will be all that my peers have as well.

Paths are made by walking

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.

The purpose of a story is to be an axe that breaks up the ice within us.

If I shall exist eternally, how shall I exist tomorrow?

Follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.

A lawyer is a person who writes a 10,000-word document and calls it a "brief."

I usually solve problems by letting them devour me.

If the literature we are reading does not wake us, why then do we read it? A literary work must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us.

Love is, that you are the knife which I plunge into myself.

I wanted to escape the unrest, to shut out the voices around me and within me, so I write.

What if I slept a little more and forgot about all this nonsense.

Anybody who preserves the ability to recognize beauty will never get old.

In the fight between you and the world, back the world.

One reads in order to ask questions

There art two cardinal sins from which all others spring: Impatience and Laziness.

I want in fact more of you. In my mind I am dressing you with light; I am wrapping you up in blankets of complete acceptance and then I give myself to you. I long for you; I who usually long without longing, as though I am unconscious and absorbed in neutrality and apathy, really, utterly long for every bit of you.

No matter how much you keep encouraging someone who is blindfolded to stare through the cloth, he still won’t see a thing.".

From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached.

I have no memory for things I have learned, nor things I have read, nor things experienced or heard, neither for people nor events; I feel that I have experienced nothing, learned nothing, that I actually know less than the average schoolboy, and that what I do know is superficial, and that every second question is beyond me. I am incapable of thinking deliberately; my thoughts run into a wall. I can grasp the essence of things in isolation, but I am quite incapable of coherent, unbroken thinking. I can't even tell a story properly; in fact, I can scarcely talk.

I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.

I no longer know If I wish to drown myself in love, vodka or the sea.

I am a retiring, silent, unsociable, and discontent person.

I do not speak as I think, I do not think as I should, and so it all goes on in helpless darkness.

Dread of night. Dread of not-night.

Should I be grateful or should I curse the fact that despite all misfortune I can still feel love, an unearthly love but still for earthly objects.

Anything that has real and lasting value is always a gift from within.

The Fathers of the Church were not afraid to go out into the desert because they had a richness in their hearts. But we, with richness all around us, are afraid, because the desert is in our hearts.

As far as I have seen, at school...they aimed at blotting out one's individuality.

I can love only what I can place so high above me that I cannot reach it.

So long as you have food in your mouth, you have solved all questions for the time being.

We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.

I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones. Basically it is nothing other than this fear we have so often talked about, but fear spread to everything, fear of the greatest as of the smallest, fear, paralyzing fear of pronouncing a word, although this fear may not only be fear but also a longing for something greater than all that is fearful.

I have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe.

I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.

I have spent my life resisting the desire to end it.

The truth is always an abyss. One must — as in a swimming pool — dare to dive from the quivering springboard of trivial everyday experience and sink into the depths, in order to later rise again — laughing and fighting for breath — to the now doubly illuminated surface of things.

What am I doing here in this endless winter?

I carry the bars within me.

First impressions are always unreliable.

Art is for the artist is only suffering through which he releases himself for further suffering.

He who seeks does not find, but he who does not seek will be found.

Last night I dreamed about you. What happened in detail I can hardly remember, all I know is that we kept merging into one another. I was you, you were me. Finally you somehow caught fire.

A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity.

I’m tired, can’t think of anything and want only to lay my face in your lap, feel your hand on my head and remain like that through all eternity.

You are so vulnerably haunting. Your eeriness is terrifyingly irresistible.

In a way, you are poetry material; You are full of cloudy subtleties I am willing to spend a lifetime figuring out. Words burst in your essence and you carry their dust in the pores of your ethereal individuality.

There's an infinite amount of hope but not for us.

I’m doing badly, I’m doing well; whichever you prefer.

It is often safer to be in chains than to be free.

People label themselves with all sorts of adjectives. I can only pronounce myself as 'nauseatingly miserable beyond repair'.

The true word leads; the untrue misleads.

If you find someone who makes you smile, who checks up on you often to see if you're okay. Who watches out or you and wants the best for you. Who loves and respects you. Don't let them go. People like that are hard to find.

I dream of a grave, deep and narrow, where we could clasp each other in our arms as with clamps, and I would hide my face in you and you would hide your face in me, and nobody would ever see us any more

Being alone has a power over me that never fails. My interior dissolves (for the time being only superficially) and is ready to release what lies deeper. When I am willfully alone, a slight ordering of my interior begins to take place and I need nothing more.

Most men are not wicked... They are sleep-walkers, not evil evildoers.

There are some things one can only achieve by a deliberate leap in the opposite direction.

There sat I, a faded being, under faded leaves.

All language is but a poor translation.

I never imagined that so many days would ultimately make such a small life.

This tremendous world I have inside of me. How to free myself, and this world, without tearing myself to pieces. And rather tear myself to a thousand pieces than be buried with this world within me.

In me, by myself, without human relationship, there are no visible lies. The limited circle is pure.

Better to have, and not need, than to need, and not have.

The Kafka paradox: art depends on truth, but truth, being indivisable, cannot know itself: to tell the truth is to lie. thus the writer is the truth, and yet when he speakes he lies.

Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self.

Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.

You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

Life is merely terrible; I feel it as few others do. Often — and in my inmost self perhaps all the time — I doubt whether I am a human being.

You can choose to be free , but it's last decision you'll ever make

Youth is happy because it has the ability to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.

You are at once both the quiet and the confusion of my heart.

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

Every thing that you love, you will eventually lose, but in the end, love will return in a different form.

It receives you when you come and dismisses you when you go.

I miss you deeply, unfathomably, senselessly, terribly.

Do not waste your time looking for an obstacle - maybe there is none.

You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid.

All I am is literature, and I am not able or willing to be anything else.

I am more uncertain than I ever was; I feel only the power of life. And I am senselessly empty.

Just think how many thoughts a blanket smothers while one lies alone in bed, and how many unhappy dreams it keeps warm.

We live in an age which is so possessed by demons, that soon we shall only be able to do goodness and justice in the deepest secrecy, as if it were a crime.

There has never been a time in which I have been convinced from within myself that I am alive. You see, I have only such a fugitive awareness of things around me that I always feel they were once real and are now fleeting away. I have a constant longing, my dear sir, to catch a glimpse of things as they may have been before they show themselves to me.

Just because your doctor has a name for your condition, doesn't mean he knows what it is.

The meaning of life is that it stops.

The limited circle is pure.

A first sign of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.

So eager are our people to obliterate the present.

Please — consider me a dream.

Love is a drama of contradictions.

My guiding principle is this: Guilt is never to be doubted.

The truth is always an abyss.

Man cannot live without a continuous confidence in something indestructible within himself.

I never wish to be easily defined. I’d rather float over other people’s minds as something strictly fluid and non-perceivable; more like a transparent, paradoxically iridescent creature rather than an actual person.

Simply wait, be quiet, still The world will freely offer itself to you.

He who does not answer the questions has passed the test.

There are only two things. Truth and lies. Truth is indivisible, hence it cannot recognize itself; anyone who wants to recognize it has to be a lie.

Some books seem like a key to unfamiliar rooms in one’s own castle.

I do not see the world at all; I invent it.

Books are a narcotic.

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for?

Evil is the starry sky of the Good.

Start with what is right rather than what is acceptable.

I lack nothing. I only needed myself.

If you become involved with me, you will be throwing yourself into the abyss.

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

If something good has lost its way into you, it will make its escape overnight. I know you.

The Bible is a sanctum; the world, sputum.

Evil is whatever distracts.

God gives the nuts, but he does not crack them.

Nothing is as deceptive as a photograph.

He is terribly afraid of dying because he hasn’t yet lived.

I am a cage, in search of a bird.