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75 Franz Kafka Quotes on Love, Life and Reading
By Vanessa Hall,
2 days ago
Born in Prague in 1883, Franz Kafka grew up to be one of the world's most well known German-language authors, even to this day. He is famous for his works that fuse elements such as realism and the fantastic. His most popular works are The Metamorphosis , a novella, and The Trial and The Castle— both novels. It's no wonder so many Franz Kafka quotes are still circulated today. The Metamorphosis is a story of a traveling salesman who has found himself transformed into a rather large insect. The Trial is a bewildering tale of a man who wakes up one morning to find he's under arrest for an unnamed offense. Seriously, the offense is never named throughout the story, adding to the drama. And lastly, The Castle is about a man posing as a surveyor to gain access to a castle. Its style is dark and eerie, especially since it was never finished. Sadly, Kafka died of tuberculosis before he could end this work.
These wild stories that evoke strange feelings of anxiety stem from the same brilliant yet dark mind that brings us these unique Kafka quotes. Keep reading to dive into the thoughts of a most fantastical man that cover topics from life to love to writing and more.
1. “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
2. “Start with what is right rather than what is acceptable.”
3. “All language is but a poor translation.”
4. “Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.”
5. “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.”
6. “I was ashamed of myself when I realized life was a costume party and I attended with my real face.”
7. “Hold fast to the diary from today on! Write regularly! Don’t surrender! Even if no salvation should come, I want to be worthy of it every moment.”
8. “I am more uncertain than I ever was; I feel only the power of life. And I am senselessly empty.”
9. “I no longer know If I wish to drown myself in love, vodka or the sea.”
17. “I can’t think of any greater happiness than to be with you all the time, without interruption, endlessly, even though I feel that here in this world there’s no undisturbed place for our love, neither in the village nor anywhere else; and I dream of a grave, deep and narrow, where we could clasp each other in our arms as with clamps, and I would hide my face in you and you would hide your face in me, and nobody would ever see us any more.”
18. “Better to have, and not need, than to need, and not have.”
19. “If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read it?”
20. “A lawyer is a person who writes a 10,000-word document and calls it a 'brief'."
21. “I’m tired, can’t think of anything and want only to lay my face in your lap, feel your hand on my head and remain like that through all eternity.”
22. “There are times when I am convinced I am unfit for any human relationship.”
23. “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. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”
24. “Isolation is a way to know ourselves.”
25. “I usually solve problems by letting them devour me.”
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26. “Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.”
27. “A First Sign of the Beginning of Understanding is the Wish to Die.”
28. “I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.”
29. “The Fathers of the Church were not afraid to go out into the desert because they had a richness in their hearts. But we, with richness all around us, are afraid, because the desert is in our hearts.”
30. “One advantage in keeping a diary is that you become aware with reassuring clarity of the changes which you constantly suffer.”
31. “A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity."
32. “Do not waste your time looking for an obstacle — maybe there is none.”
33. “I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy.”
34. “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.”
38. “I never wish to be easily defined. I’d rather float over other people’s minds as something strictly fluid and non-perceivable; more like a transparent, paradoxically iridescent creature rather than an actual person.”
39. “It's only because of their stupidity that they're able to be so sure of themselves.”
40. “If you become involved with me, you will be throwing yourself into the abyss.”
42. “I need solitude for my writing; not ‘like a hermit’ – that wouldn’t be enough – but like a dead man.”
43. “I can love only what I can place so high above me that I cannot reach it.”
44. “I am a cage, in search of a bird.”
45. “I miss you deeply, unfathomably, senselessly, terribly.”
46. “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.”
47. “Slept, awoke, slept, awoke, miserable life.”
48. “One idiot is one idiot. Two idiots are two idiots. Ten thousand idiots are a political party.”
49. “God gives the nuts, but he does not crack them.”
50. “Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self.”
51. “The man in ecstasy and the man drowning: both raise their arms.”
52. “Paths are made by walking”
53. “There art two cardinal sins from which all others spring: Impatience and Laziness.”
54. “All human errors are impatience, a premature breaking off of methodical procedure, an apparent fencing-in of what is apparently at issue.”
55. “To write prescriptions is easy, but to come to an understanding with people is hard.”
56. “He who seeks does not find, but he who does not seek will be found.”
57. “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.”
58. “In the fight between you and the world, back the world.”
59. “I am in chains. Don’t touch my chains.”
60. “Now I can look at you in peace; I don’t eat you any more.”
70. “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.”
71. “Most men are not wicked. They are sleepwalkers, not evil evildoers.”
72. “Love is a drama of contradictions.”
73. “From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached.”
74. “So long as you have food in your mouth, you have solved all questions for the time being.”
75. “He is terribly afraid of dying because he hasn’t yet lived.”
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