Top 15 Franz Kafka Quotes

Bohemian writer from Prague (1883–1924)

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Franz Kafka (3 July 1883 – 3 June 1924) was a Bohemian-Jewish novelist, and one of the major German-language fiction writers of the 20th century.

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Alternative Names: František Kafka • Kafka

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A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.

I am a cage, in search of a bird.

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

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need 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. That is my belief.

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

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

The Metamorphosis · March 1, 1972 Verified in 2 sources · 1 more available Sign up to see the complete provenance

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I am free and that is why I am lost.

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.

The meaning of life is that it stops.

A First Sign of the Beginning of Understanding is the Wish to Die.

All language is but a poor translation.

"A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity."

[Letter to Max Brod, July 5, 1922]

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

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.