Words matter. These are the best Franz Kafka Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached.
The thornbush is the old obstacle in the road. It must catch fire if you want to go further.
We all have wings, but they have not been of any avail to us and if we could tear them off, we would do so.
Youth is happy because it has the ability to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.
The decisive moment in human evolution is perpetual. That is why the revolutionary spiritual movements that declare all former things worthless are in the right, for nothing has yet happened.
The relationship to one’s fellow man is the relationship of prayer, the relationship to oneself is the relationship of striving; it is from prayer that one draws the strength for one’s striving.
How can one take delight in the world unless one flees to it for refuge?
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.
The indestructible is one: it is each individual human being and, at the same time, it is common to all, hence the incomparably indivisible union that exists between human beings.
Idleness is the beginning of all vice, the crown of all virtues.
Self-control means wanting to be effective at some random point in the infinite radiations of my spiritual existence.
We all have wings, but they have not been of any avail to us and if we could tear them off, we would do so.
A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.
Heaven is dumb, echoing only the dumb.
Hiding places there are innumerable, escape is only one, but possibilities of escape, again, are as many as hiding places.
Don Quixote’s misfortune is not his imagination, but Sancho Panza.
Martyrs do not underrate the body, they allow it to be elevated on the cross. In this they are at one with their antagonists.
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.
I do not read advertisements. I would spend all of my time wanting things.
One advantage in keeping a diary is that you become aware with reassuring clarity of the changes which you constantly suffer.
Evil is whatever distracts.
The spirit becomes free only when it ceases to be a support.
Anyone who cannot come to terms with his life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate… but with his other hand he can note down what he sees among the ruins.
In theory there is a possibility of perfect happiness: To believe in the indestructible element within one, and not to strive towards it.
Start with what is right rather than what is acceptable.
God gives the nuts, but he does not crack them.
If I shall exist eternally, how shall I exist tomorrow?
If there is a transmigration of souls then I am not yet on the bottom rung. My life is a hesitation before birth.
By imposing too great a responsibility, or rather, all responsibility, on yourself, you crush yourself.
How pathetically scanty my self-knowledge is compared with, say, my knowledge of my room. There is no such thing as observation of the inner world, as there is of the outer world.
Always first draw fresh breath after outbursts of vanity and complacency.
Sensual love deceives one as to the nature of heavenly love; it could not do so alone, but since it unconsciously has the element of heavenly love within it, it can do so.
By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.
It is only our conception of time that makes us call the Last Judgement by this name. It is, in fact, a kind of martial law.
Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.
There is nothing besides a spiritual world; what we call the world of the senses is the Evil in the spiritual world, and what we call Evil is only the necessity of a moment in our eternal evolution.
One of the first signs of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.
Let me remind you of the old maxim: people under suspicion are better moving than at rest, since at rest they may be sitting in the balance without knowing it, being weighed together with their sins.
Religions get lost as people do.
Association with human beings lures one into self-observation.
