The Best Franz Kafka quotes

Evil is the starry sky of the Good. — Franz Kafka

The mediation by the serpent was necessary. Evil can seduce man, but cannot become man. — Franz Kafka

The ulterior motives with which you absorb and assimilate Evil are not your own but those of Evil. — Franz Kafka

When one has once accepted and absorbed Evil, it no longer demands to be believed. — Franz Kafka

Most men are not wicked… They are sleep–walkers, not evil evildoers. — Franz Kafka

Not everyone can see the truth, but he can be it. — Franz Kafka

The truth is always an abyss. — Franz Kafka

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. — Franz Kafka

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. — Franz Kafka

Our art is a way of being dazzled by truth: the light on the grotesquely grimacing retreating face is true, and nothing else. — Franz Kafka

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

Love is a drama of contradictions. — Franz Kafka

You are the knife I turn inside myself; that is love. That, my dear, is love. — Franz Kafka

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

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

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

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

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

Sensual love deceives one as to the nature of heavenly love; it could not do so alone, but since it unconsciously has the element of heavenly love within it, it can do so. — Franz Kafka

Love has as few problems as a motor car. The only problems are the driver, the passengers, and the road. — Franz Kafka

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. — Franz Kafka

You are free and that is why you are lost. — Franz Kafka

So then you’re free?’ ‘Yes, I’m free,’ said Karl, and nothing seemed more worthless than his freedom. — Franz Kafka

It is often safer to be in chains than to be free. — Franz Kafka

There are questions we could not get past if we were not set free from them by our very nature. — Franz Kafka

The spirit becomes free only when it ceases to be a support. — Franz Kafka

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. — Franz Kafka

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

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. — Franz Kafka

He is a free and secure citizen of the world because he is on a chain that is long enough to allow him access to all parts of the earth, and yet not so long that he could be swept over the edge of it. — Franz Kafka

Because of impatience we were driven out [of Paradise]; because of impatience we cannot return. — Franz Kafka

Adam’s first domestic pet after the expulsion from Paradise was the serpent. — Franz Kafka

Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin impatience. because of impatience we are driven out of paradise because of impatience we cannot return. — Franz Kafka

We were expelled from Paradise, but it was not destroyed. The expulsion from Paradise was in one sense a piece of good fortune, for if we had not been expelled, Paradise would have had to be destroyed. — Franz Kafka

If what was supposed to have been destroyed in Paradise was destructible, then it was not decisive; but if it was indestructible, then we are living in a false belief. — Franz Kafka

We were created in order to live in Paradise, and Paradise was ordained to serve us. What was ordained for us has been changed; it is not said that this has also happened with what was ordained for Paradise. — Franz Kafka

Heaven is dumb, echoing only the dumb. — Franz Kafka

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

The Bible is a sanctum; the world, sputum. — Franz Kafka

The whole visible world is perhaps nothing more than the rationalization of a man who wants to find peace for a moment. — Franz Kafka

It is comforting to reflect that the disproportion of things in the world seems to be only arithmetical. — Franz Kafka

How can one take delight in the world unless one flees to it for refuge? — Franz Kafka

In the struggle between yourself and the world second the world. — Franz Kafka

You need not even listen, just wait…the world will offer itself freely to you, unmasking itself. — Franz Kafka

There is nothing bad to fear; once you have crossed that threshold, all is well. Another world, and you do not have to speak — Franz Kafka

Either the world is so tiny or we are enormous; in either case, we fill it completely. — Franz Kafka

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

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

One must not cheat anyone, not even the world of its victory. — Franz Kafka

It isn’t necessary that you leave home. Sit at your desk and listen. Don’t even listen, just wait. Don’t wait, be still and alone. The whole world will offer itself to you. — Franz Kafka

The whole visible world is perhaps nothing other than a motivation of man’s wish to rest for a moment an attempt to falsify the fact of knowledge, to try to turn the knowledge into the goal. — Franz Kafka

From outside one will always triumphantly impress theories upon the world and then fall straight into the ditch one has dug, but only from inside will one keep oneself and the world quiet and true. — Franz Kafka

How pathetically scanty my self–knowledge is compared with, say, my knowledge of my room. There is no such thing as observation of the inner world, as there is of the outer world. — Franz Kafka

Suffering is the positive element in this world, indeed it is the only link between this world and the positive. — Franz Kafka

The fact that there is nothing but a spiritual world deprives us of hope and gives us certainty. — Franz Kafka

There is nothing besides a spiritual world; what we call the world of the senses is the Evil in the spiritual world, and what we call Evil is only the necessity of a moment in our eternal evolution. — Franz Kafka

No,’ said the priest, ‘you don’t need to accept everything as true, you only have to accept it as necessary.’ ‘Depressing view,’ said K. ‘The lie made into the rule of the world. — Franz Kafka

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

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

Death confronts us not unlike the historical battle scene that hangs on the wall of the classroom. It is our task to obscure or quite obliterate the picture by our deeds while we are still in this world. — Franz Kafka

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

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

Do not waste your time looking for an obstacle–maybe there is none. — Franz Kafka

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. — Franz Kafka

This morning, for the first time in a long time, the joy again of imagining a knife twisted in my heart. — Franz Kafka

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

Time is short, my strength is limited, the office is a horror, the apartment is noisy, and if a pleasant, straightforward life is not possible, then one must try to wriggle through by subtle manoeuvres. — Franz Kafka

Only our concept of time makes it possible for us to speak of the Day of Judgment by that name in reality it is a summary court in perpetual session. — Franz Kafka

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

The indestructible is one: it is each individual human being and, at the same time, it is common to all, hence the incomparably indivisible union that exists between human beings. — Franz Kafka

I am away from home and must always write home, even if any home of mine has long since floated away into eternity. — Franz Kafka

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

There is a down–and–outness under true knowledge and a childlike happy arising from it. — Franz Kafka

Knowledge we have. Anyone who strives for it with particular intensity is suspect of striving against it. — Franz Kafka

All knowledge, the totality of all questions and answers, is contained in the dog. — Franz Kafka