Franz Kafka was a German-speaking Bohemian novelist and short-story writer, widely regarded as one of the major figures of 20th-century literature. His work fuses elements of realism and the fantastic. This Franz Kafka Quotes on life, Prague will motivate you.
Best Franz Kafka Quotes
- “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.” ~ Franz Kafka
- “If you find someone who makes you smile, who checks up on you often to see if you’re okay. Who watches out or you and wants the best for you. Who loves and respects you. Don’t let them go. People like that are hard to find.” ~ Franz Kafka
- “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.” ~ Franz Kafka
- “It’s only because of their stupidity that they’re able to be so sure of themselves.” ~ Franz Kafka
- “I no longer know If I wish to drown myself in love, vodka, or the sea.” ~ Franz Kafka
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“Paths are made by walking” ~ Franz Kafka
- “I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.” ~ Franz Kafka
- “Do not waste your time looking for an obstacle – maybe there is none.” ~ Franz Kafka
- “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.” ~ Franz Kafka
- “Isolation is a way to know ourselves.” ~ Franz Kafka Quotes
- “We live in an age which is so possessed by demons, that soon we shall only be able to do goodness and justice in the deepest secrecy as if it were a crime.” ~ Franz Kafka
- “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.” ~ Franz Kafka
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“Start with what is right rather than what is acceptable.” ~ Franz Kafka
- “If the literature we are reading does not wake us, why then do we read it? A literary work must be an ice-ax to break the sea frozen inside us.” ~ Franz Kafka
- “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.” ~ Franz Kafka
- “The meaning of life is that it stops.” ~ Franz Kafka
- “I am a cage, in search of a bird.” ~ Franz Kafka
- “Just because your doctor has a name for your condition, doesn’t mean he knows what it is.” ~ Franz Kafka
- “People label themselves with all sorts of adjectives. I can only pronounce myself as ‘nauseatingly miserable beyond repair’.” ~ Franz Kafka
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“I’m doing badly, I’m doing well; whichever you prefer.” ~ Franz Kafka
- “I usually solve problems by letting them devour me.” ~ Franz Kafka
- “The truth is always an abyss. One must — as in a swimming pool — dare to dive from the quivering springboard of trivial everyday experience and sink into the depths, in order to later rise again — laughing and fighting for breath — to the now doubly illuminated surface of things.” ~ Franz Kafka
- “I do not see the world at all; I invent it.” ~ Franz Kafka
- “Being alone has a power over me that never fails. My interior dissolves (for the time being only superficially) and is ready to release what lies deeper. When I am willfully alone, a slight ordering of my interior begins to take place and I need nothing more.” ~ Franz Kafka
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“I am free and that is why I am lost.” ~ Franz Kafka
- “Being alone has a power over me that never fails. My interior dissolves (for the time being only superficially) and is ready to release what lies deeper. When I am willfully alone, a slight ordering of my interior begins to take place and I need nothing more.” ~ Franz Kafka
- “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.” ~ Franz Kafka
- “There are some things one can only achieve by a deliberate leap in the opposite direction.” ~ Franz Kafka
- “You can choose to be free, but it’s last decision you’ll ever make” ~ Franz Kafka
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“I do not see the world at all; I invent it.” ~ Franz Kafka
- “He is terribly afraid of dying because he hasn’t yet lived.” ~ Franz Kafka
- “There are times when I am convinced I am unfit for any human relationship.” ~ Franz Kafka
- “From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached.” ~ Franz Kafka
- “I have no memory for things I have learned, nor things I have read, nor things experienced or heard, neither for people nor events; I feel that I have experienced nothing, learned nothing, that I actually know less than the average schoolboy, and that what I do know is superficial, and that every second question is beyond me. I am incapable of thinking deliberately; my thoughts run into a wall. I can grasp the essence of things in isolation, but I am quite incapable of coherent, unbroken thinking. I can’t even tell a story properly; in fact, I can scarcely talk.” ~ Franz Kafka
- “They say ignorance is bliss…. they’re wrong” ~ Franz Kafka
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“All language is but a poor translation.” ~ Franz Kafka
- “All language is but a poor translation.” ~ Franz Kafka
- “Follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.” ~ Franz Kafka
- “Only the moment counts. It determines life.” ~ Franz Kafka
- “I want in fact more of you. In my mind I am dressing you with light; I am wrapping you up in blankets of complete acceptance and then I give myself to you. I long for you; I who usually long without longing, as though I am unconscious and absorbed in neutrality and apathy, really, utterly long for every bit of you.” ~ Franz Kafka
- “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 anymore.” ~ Franz Kafka
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“In the fight between you and the world, back the world.” ~ Franz Kafka
- “In a way, you are poetry material; You are full of cloudy subtleties I am willing to spend a lifetime figuring out. Words burst in your essence and you carry their dust in the pores of your ethereal individuality.” ~ Franz Kafka
- “I have spent my life resisting the desire to end it.” ~ Franz Kafka
- “I can love only what I can place so high above me that I cannot reach it.” ~ Franz Kafka
