Kafka quotes

One is responsible to life, but not for life.

The meaning of life is that it ends.

Don’t despair: despair suggests you are in total control and know what is coming. You don’t – surrender to events with hope.

I am a cage, in search of a bird.

Start with what is right rather than what is acceptable.

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

I am free and that is why I am lost.

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

Believing in progress does not mean believing that any progress has yet been made.

Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.

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

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.

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 within us.

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

I am in chains. Don’t touch my chains.

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.

There is an infinite amount of hope in the universe … but not for us.

I have the feeling that beneath these words there lies, simply, a silence that is both threatening and promising.

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

Miss Samsa sat upright in bed and drew up the sheets under her chin.

Without leaps of imagination or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.

The thorn always remains hidden and is never seen in the flesh.

Logic may indeed be unshakeable, but it cannot withstand a man who is determined to live.

In man’s struggle against the world, bet on the world.

It is not necessary that you leave the house. Remain at your table and listen. Do not even listen, only wait. Do not even wait, be wholly still and alone. The world will present itself to you for its unmasking, it can do no other, in ecstasy it will writhe at your feet.

I never wish to be easily defined.

Beyond a certain point there is no return. This point has to be reached.

Don’t despair, not even over the fact that you don’t despair.

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.

I have the true feeling of myself only when I’m doing nothing, I’m not on anyone’s stage, nor making speeches, nor being interviewed.

The purpose of life is to keep going forward, to keep stepping out of one’s comfort zone.

The fact that on the surface everything turns to a person’s advantage is no guarantee of anything whatsoever.

I shouldn’t be at all surprised if at the moment of death there is something not unlike a gust of blinding light.

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

The branches that obstructed the view one day become useful as scaffolding.

It suddenly struck him that what he was dreaming was not a floor but the ceiling, consequently upside down, a fact that made him dizzy.

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

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us.

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.

I am separated from all things by a hollow space, and I do not even reach to its rim.

We all have wings, but they have not been of any avail to us and if we could tear them off, we would do so.

Every true love and friendship is furthered by the doubt that the loved one can possibly be transformed.

Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbor; act as if you did.

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