Source: Letters to Milena
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Famous Franz Kafka Quotes
“As far as I have seen, at school...they aimed at blotting out one's individuality.”
“You need not even listen, just wait...the world will offer itself freely to you, unmasking itself.”
Source: 1914-1923. Tr. by Martin Greenberg, with the co-operation of Hannah Arendt
“There are some things one can only achieve by a deliberate leap in the opposite direction.”
Source: Selected Short Stories of Franz Kafka
Source: Wedding preparations in the country: and other posthumous prose writings. With notes by Max Brod
“Follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”
Source: The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, and Other Stories
Source: The Metamorphosis
“Writing means revealing oneself to excess.”
Source: Letters to Felice
Source: The great wall of China: stories and reflections
“A belief is like a guillotine, just as heavy, just as light.”
Source: Shorter works [of] Franz Kafka
Source: The great wall of China: stories and reflections
“Going to pieces. To go to pieces so pointlessly and unnecessarily.”
Source: The Diaries of Franz Kafka: 1914-1923. Tr. by Martin Greenberg, with the co-operation of Hannah Arendt
“A man of action forced into a state of thought is unhappy until he can get out of it.”
Source: Wedding preparations in the country: and other posthumous prose writings. With notes by Max Brod
“There is a down-and-outness under true knowledge and a childlike happy arising from it.”
Source: The Blue Octavo Notebooks
Source: The Blue Octavo Notebooks
Source: The Blue Octavo Notebooks
Source: The diaries of Franz Kafka
Source: The Blue Octavo Notebooks
Source: The Blue Octavo Notebooks
Source: Kafka's
“A lawyer is a person who writes a 10,000-word document and calls it a "brief."”
Source: Letters to Felice
“Sometimes I think I can expiate all my past and future sins through the aching of my bones.”
Source: The Blue Octavo Notebooks
“I am more uncertain than I ever was; I feel only the power of life. And I am senselessly empty.”
Source: I am a memory come alive: autobiographical writings
Source: The Diaries of Franz Kafka: 1914-1923. Tr. by Martin Greenberg, with the co-operation of Hannah Arendt
“A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul.”
“Some books seem like a key to unfamiliar rooms in one’s own castle.”
Source: Letters to friends, family, and editors
“Simply wait, be quiet, still The world will freely offer itself to you.”
Source: The Blue Octavo Notebooks
“Do not waste your time looking for an obstacle - maybe there is none.”
Source: I am a memory come alive: autobiographical writings
“Man cannot live without a continuous confidence in something indestructible within himself.”
“We need the books that affect us like a disaster”
Source: The Basic Kafka
Source: The Blue Octavo Notebooks
“Not everyone can see the truth, but he can be it.”
Source: The Blue Octavo Notebooks