Quotes By Franz Kafka

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

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

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

Evil is whatever distracts.

In theory there is a possibility of perfect happiness: To believe in the indestructible element within one, and not to strive towards it.

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.

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

Dread of night. Dread of not-night.

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.

Let me remind you of the old maxim: people under suspicion are better moving than at rest, since at rest they may be sitting in the balance without knowing it, being weighed together with their sins.

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.

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.

The relationship to one's fellow man is the relationship of prayer, the relationship to oneself is the relationship of striving; it is from prayer that one draws the strength for one's striving.

May I kiss you then? On this miserable paper? I might as well open the window and kiss the night air.

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

Self-control means wanting to be effective at some random point in the infinite radiations of my spiritual existence.

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

If there is a transmigration of souls then I am not yet on the bottom rung. My life is a hesitation before birth.

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

Always first draw fresh breath after outbursts of vanity and complacency.

Heaven is dumb, echoing only the dumb.

Tyranny or slavery, born of selfishness, are the two educational methods of parents; all gradations of tyranny or slavery.

No sooner said than done - so acts your man of worth.

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

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.

By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.

The history of mankind is the instant between two strides taken by a traveler.

Test yourself on mankind. It is something that makes the doubter doubt, the believer believe.

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

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