Franz Kafka Quotes

One has either to take people as they are, or leave them as they are. One cannot change them, one can merely disturb their balance. A human being, after all, is not made up of single pieces, from which a single piece can be taken out and replaced by something else.

Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.

Go on caring for me.

So eager are our people to obliterate the present.

You must not pay too much attention to opinions. The written word is unalterable, and opinions are often only an expression of despair.

2 November. This morning, for the first time in a long time, the joy again of imagining a knife twisted in my heart.

My condition is not unhappiness, but it is also not happiness, not indifference, not weakness, not fatigue, not another interest – so what is it then?

Even the merest gesture is holy if it is filled with faith.

You once said that you would like to sit beside me while I write. Listen, in that case I could not write at all. For writing means revealing oneself to excess; that utmost of self-revelation and surrender, in which a human being, when involved with others, would feel he was losing himself, and from which, therefore, he will always shrink as long as he is in his right mind — for everyone wants to live as long as he is alive — even the degree of self-revelation and surrender is not enough for writing.
Writing that springs from the surface of existence — when there is no other way and deeper wells have dried up — is nothing, and collapses the moment a truer emotion makes the surface shake. That is why one can never be alone enough when one writes, why there can never be enough silence around one when one writes, why even night is not night enough.

Nor is it perhaps really love when I say that for me you are the most beloved; In this love you are like a knife, with which I explore myself.

Pienso que sólo debemos leer libros de los que muerden y pinchan. Si el libro que estamos leyendo no nos obliga a despertarnos como un puñetazo en la cara, ¿para qué molestarnos en leerlo? ¿Para que nos haga felices, como dice tu carta? Cielo santo, ¡seríamos igualmente felices si no tuviéramos ningún libro! Los libros que nos hagan felices podríamos escribirlos nosotros mismos, si no nos quedara otro remedio. Lo que necesitamos son libros que nos golpeen como una desgracia dolorosa, como la muerte de alguien a quien queríamos más que a nosotros mismos, libros que nos hagan sentirnos desterrados a los bosques más remotos, lejos de toda presencia humana, algo semejante al suicidio. Un libro debe ser el hacha que rompa el mar helado dentro de nosotros. Eso es lo que creo”.

I am too tired, I must try to rest and sleep, otherwise I am lost in every respect. What an effort to keep alive! Erecting a monument does not require an expenditure of so much strength.

... it is, after all, not necessary to fly right into the middle of the sun, but it is necessary to crawl to a clean little spot on Earth where the sun sometimes shines and one can warm oneself a little.

Everyone carries a room about inside him. This fact can even be proved by means of the sense of hearing. If someone walks fast and one pricks up one’s ears and listens, say in the night, when everything round about is quiet, one hears, for instance, the rattling of a mirror not quite firmly fastened to the wall.

Self-control is something for which I do not strive. Self-control means wanting to be effective at some random point in the infinite radiations of my spiritual existence.