Now the sirens have a still more fatal weapon than their song, namely their silence... someone might have escaped from their singing; but from their silence, certainly never. - Franz Kafka
Τα βιβλία που έχουμε ανάγκη είναι εκείνα που πέφτουν σαν το τσεκούρι στην παγωμένη θάλασσα της ψυχής μας. - Franz Kafka
Love is a drama of contradictions. - Franz Kafka
I need solitude for my writing; not 'like a hermit' - that wouldn't be enough - but like a dead man. - Franz Kafka
All human errors are impatience, a premature breaking off of methodical procedure, an apparent fencing-in of what is apparently at issue. - Franz Kafka
Life is merely terrible; I feel it as few others do. Often — and in my inmost self perhaps all the time — I doubt whether I am a human being. - 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
Even the merest gesture is holy if it is filled with faith. - Franz Kafka
Most men are not wicked... They are sleep-walkers, not evil evildoers. - Franz Kafka
May I kiss you then? On this miserable paper? I might as well open the window and kiss the night air. - Franz Kafka
I have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe. - Franz Kafka
Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy. - Franz Kafka
I am forever fettered to myself [...] and that's what I must try to live with. - Franz Kafka
Did he really want this warm room of his, so comfortably fitted with old family furniture, to be transformed into a cave, in which, no doubt, he would be free to crawl about unimpeded in all directions, but only at the price of rapidly and completely forgetting his human past at the same time? - Franz Kafka
Life is hard, the earth stubborn, science rich in knowledge but poor in practical results. - Franz Kafka
The existence of the writer is an argument against the existence of the soul, for the soul has obviously taken flight from the real ego, but not improved itself, only become a writer. - Franz Kafka
Kill me, or you are a murderer. - Franz Kafka
By your side I’m most quiet and most unquiet, most inhibited and most free. - Franz Kafka
What I write is different from what I say, what I say is different from what I think, what I think is different from what I ought to think and so it goes further into the deepest darkness. - Franz Kafka
It is only because of their stupidity that they are able to be so sure of themselves. - Franz Kafka
Every word first looks around in every direction before letting itself be written down by me. - Franz Kafka
I am as I am, and that's all there is to it, I can hardly take a pair of scissors to myself, and cut out a different person... - Franz Kafka
Evil does not exist; once you have crossed the threshold, all is good. Once in another world, you must hold your tongue. - Franz Kafka
Youth is happy because it has the capacity to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old. - Franz Kafka
What is written is merely the dregs of experience. - Franz Kafka
Writer speaks a stench. - Franz Kafka
Even if no salvation should come, I want to be worthy of it at every moment. - Franz Kafka
The Kafka paradox: art depends on truth, but truth, being indivisable, cannot know itself: to tell the truth is to lie. thus the writer is the truth, and yet when he speaks he lies. - Franz Kafka
But all remains unchanged. - Franz Kafka
All I am is literature, and I am not able or willing to be anything else. - Franz Kafka
Please — consider me a dream. - Franz Kafka
Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself. - Franz Kafka
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. - Franz Kafka
Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self. - Franz Kafka
You need not leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. You need not even listen, simply wait, just learn to become 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
One tells as few lies as possible only by telling as few lies as possible and not by having the least possible opportunity to do so. - Franz Kafka
L'éternité, c'est long ... surtout vers la fin. - Franz Kafka
Isolation is a way to know ourselves. - Franz Kafka
A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity."[Letter to Max Brod, July 5, 1922] - Franz Kafka
We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes. - Franz Kafka
Anything that has real and lasting value is always a gift from within. - Franz Kafka
A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us. - Franz Kafka
[He] used to be soinsignificant that one literally felt alone in his presence. - Franz Kafka
My health is only just good enough for myself alone, not good enough for marriage, let alone fatherhood. Yet when I read your letter, I feel I could overlook even what cannot possibly be overlooked. - Franz Kafka
A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. - Franz Kafka
There art two cardinal sins from which all others spring: Impatience and Laziness. - Franz Kafka
One of the first signs of the beginnings of understanding is the wish to die. This life appears unbearable, another unattainable. One is no longer ashamed of wanting to die; one asks to be moved from the old cell, which one hates, to a new one, which one will only in time come to hate. - Franz Kafka
The meaning of life is that it stops. - Franz Kafka
Atlas was permitted the opinion that he was at liberty, if he wished, to drop the Earth and creep away; but this opinion was all that he was permitted. - Franz Kafka
Fear of night. Fear of not night. - Franz Kafka
my heart no longer beats but is a tugging muscle, - Franz Kafka
I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. - Franz Kafka
The limited circle is pure. - Franz Kafka
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
Writing is prayer. - Franz Kafka
But what if all the tranquility, all the comfort, all the contentment were now to come to a horrifying end? - 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
We need the 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 inside us. - Franz Kafka
Books are a narcotic. - 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
The meaning of life is that it ends - Franz Kafka
You are free, and that is why you are lost. - Franz Kafka
If it had been possible to build the Tower of Babel without ascending it, the work would have been permitted. - Franz Kafka
I do not speak as I think, I do not think as I should, and so it all goes on in helpless darkness. - Franz Kafka
Evil is the starry sky of the Good. - Franz Kafka
From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. - Franz Kafka
I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy. - Franz Kafka
He is terribly afraid of dying because he hasn’t yet lived. - Franz Kafka
Ein Buch muß die Axt sein für das gefrorene Meer in uns. - Franz Kafka
She is so distinct to me, it's as though I had run my hands all over her. - Franz Kafka
People who walk across dark bridges, past saints,with dim, small lights.Clouds which move across gray skiespast churcheswith towers darkened in the dusk.One who leans against granite railinggazing into the evening waters,His hands resting on old stones. - Franz Kafka