Franz Kafka quote: "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."

Idleness is the beginning of all vice, the crown of all virtues.
FRANZ KAFKA

A book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us.
FRANZ KAFKA

But I’m not guilty,” said K. “there’s been a mistake. How is it even possible for someone to...
FRANZ KAFKA

By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is w...
FRANZ KAFKA

One must not cheat anyone, not even the world of its victory.
FRANZ KAFKA

The thornbush is the old obstacle in the road. It must catch fire if you want to go further.
FRANZ KAFKA

Sensual love deceives one as to the nature of heavenly love; it could not do so alone, but since it ...
FRANZ KAFKA

We are separated from God on two sides; the Fall separates us from Him, the Tree of Life separates H...
FRANZ KAFKA

There are only two things. Truth and lies. Truth is indivisible, hence it cannot recognize itself; a...
FRANZ KAFKA

If I shall exist eternally, how shall I exist tomorrow?
FRANZ KAFKA

Youth is happy because it has the ability to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty...
FRANZ KAFKA

In the fight between you and the world, back the world.
FRANZ KAFKA

The meaning of life is that it stops.
FRANZ KAFKA

Life's splendor forever lies in wait about each one of us in all its fullness, but veiled from view,...
FRANZ KAFKA

I can prove at any time that my education tried to make another person out of me than the one I beca...
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...
FRANZ KAFKA

Youth is happy because it has the capacity to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty...
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

Now I can look at you in peace; I don't eat you any more.
FRANZ KAFKA

Si el libro que leemos no nos despierta de un puñetazo en el cráneo, ¿para qué leerlo?… Un lib...
FRANZ KAFKA

The limited circle is pure.
FRANZ KAFKA

All human errors are impatience, a premature breaking off of methodical procedure, an apparent fenci...
FRANZ KAFKA

I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy.
FRANZ KAFKA

A belief is like a guillotine, just as heavy, just as light.
FRANZ KAFKA

In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that n...
FRANZ KAFKA

It is not necessary that you leave the house. Remain at your table and listen. Do not even listen, o...
FRANZ KAFKA

You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do an...
FRANZ KAFKA

From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reac...
FRANZ KAFKA

My fear... is my substance, and probably the best part of me.
FRANZ KAFKA

My guiding principle is this: Guilt is never to be doubted.
FRANZ KAFKA

Human judgment of human actions is true and void , that is to say, first true and then void.... The ...
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

Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.
FRANZ KAFKA

One must not cheat anybody, not even the world of one's triumph.
FRANZ KAFKA

In any bureaucracy, paper work increases as you spend more and more time reporting on the less and l...
FRANZ KAFKA

This inescapable duty to observe oneself: if someone else is observing me, naturally I have to obser...
FRANZ KAFKA

I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, t...
FRANZ KAFKA

There art two cardinal sins from which all others spring: Impatience and Laziness.
FRANZ KAFKA

The history of mankind is the instant between two strides taken by a traveler.
FRANZ KAFKA

You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, sim...
FRANZ KAFKA

I do not read advertisements. I would spend all of my time wanting things.
FRANZ KAFKA

A first sign of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.
FRANZ KAFKA

God gives the nuts, but he does not crack them.
FRANZ KAFKA

So long as you have food in your mouth, you have solved all questions for the time being.
FRANZ KAFKA

My peers, lately, have found companionship through means of intoxication - it makes them sociable. I...
FRANZ KAFKA

Anyone who cannot come to terms with his life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little ...
FRANZ KAFKA

It is often safer to be in chains than to be free.
FRANZ KAFKA

But perhaps the enthusiastic sensibility of young women of her age also played a role. This feeling ...
FRANZ KAFKA

Atlas was permitted the opinion that he was at liberty, if he wished, to drop the Earth and creep aw...
FRANZ KAFKA

If it had been possible to build the Tower of Babel without climbing it, it would have been permitte...
FRANZ KAFKA

We all have wings, but they have not been of any avail to us and if we could tear them off, we would...
FRANZ KAFKA

Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.
FRANZ KAFKA

My 'fear' is my substance, and probably the best part of me.
FRANZ KAFKA

It seems hard to remain a bachelor...to model your appearance and behaviour on one or two bachelors ...
FRANZ KAFKA

L'éternité, c'est long ... surtout vers la fin.
FRANZ KAFKA

By imposing too great a responsibility, or rather, all responsibility, on yourself, you crush yourse...
FRANZ KAFKA

The decisive moment in human evolution is perpetual. That is why the revolutionary spiritual movemen...
FRANZ KAFKA

It is comforting to reflect that the disproportion of things in the world seems to be only arithmeti...
FRANZ KAFKA

It would have been so pointless to kill himself that, even if he had wanted to, the pointlessness wo...
FRANZ KAFKA

In a way, I was safe writing
FRANZ KAFKA

I am a cage, in search of a bird.
FRANZ KAFKA

Start with what is right rather than what is acceptable.
FRANZ KAFKA

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a...
FRANZ KAFKA

The dream reveals the reality which conception lags behind. That is the horror of life -- the terr...
FRANZ KAFKA

Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self.
FRANZ KAFKA

For words are magical formulae. They leave finger marks be hind on the brain, which in the twinkling...
FRANZ KAFKA

You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, sim...
FRANZ KAFKA

Now the sirens have a still more fatal weapon than their song, namely their silence... someone might...
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

Youth is happy because it has the ability to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty ...
FRANZ KAFKA

There are two main human sins from which all the others derive: impatience and indolence. It was bec...
FRANZ KAFKA

Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy
FRANZ KAFKA

In theory there is a possibility of perfect happiness: To believe in the indestructible element with...
FRANZ KAFKA

Martyrs do not underrate the body, they allow it to be elevated on the cross. In this they are at on...
FRANZ KAFKA

"Everything you say is boring and incomprehensible," she said, "but that alone doesn't make it true
FRANZ KAFKA

It's often safer to be in chains than to be free
FRANZ KAFKA

A stair not worn hollow by footsteps is, regarded from its own point of view, only a boring somethin...
FRANZ KAFKA

Persons who write a 10,000 word document and call it a brief
FRANZ KAFKA

Books are a narcotic
FRANZ KAFKA

In argument similes are like songs in love; they describe much, but prove nothing.
FRANZ KAFKA

You may object that it is not a trial at all; you are quite right, for it is only a trial if I recog...
FRANZ KAFKA

I do not hope for victory
FRANZ KAFKA

The experience of life consists of the experience which the spirit has of itself in matter and as ma...
FRANZ KAFKA

From the true antagonist, illimitable courage is transmitted to you
FRANZ KAFKA

Writing is a sweet, wonderful reward
FRANZ KAFKA

All knowledge, the totality of all questions and all answers is contained in the dog
FRANZ KAFKA

We are sinful not merely because we have eaten of the tree of knowledge, but also because we have no...
FRANZ KAFKA

Evil is whatever distracts.
FRANZ KAFKA

If the French were German in their essence, then how the Germans would admire them!
FRANZ KAFKA

How pathetically scanty my self-knowledge is compared with, say, my knowledge of my room. There is n...
FRANZ KAFKA

The indestructible is one: it is each individual human being and, at the same time, it is common to ...
FRANZ KAFKA

One of the first signs of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die. This life appears unbea...
FRANZ KAFKA

Who has the gift to recognize beauty, will not live long
FRANZ KAFKA

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doe...
FRANZ KAFKA

Don Quixote's misfortune is not his imagination, but Sancho Panza.
FRANZ KAFKA

This tremendous world I have inside of me. How to free myself, and this world, without tearing mysel...
FRANZ KAFKA

There sat I, a faded being, under faded leaves.
FRANZ KAFKA

My condition is not unhappiness, but it is also not happiness, not indifference, not weakness, not f...
FRANZ KAFKA

My doubts stand in a circle around every word, I see them before I see the word, but what then! I do...
FRANZ KAFKA

Being alone has a power over me that never fails. My interior dissolves (for the time being only sup...
FRANZ KAFKA

Nervous states of the worst sort control me without pause. Everything that is not literature bores m...
FRANZ KAFKA

April 27. Incapable of living with people, of speaking. Complete immersion in myself, thinking of my...
FRANZ KAFKA

The state we find ourselves in is sinful quite independent of guilt.
FRANZ KAFKA

A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.
FRANZ KAFKA

The mediation by the serpent was necessary. Evil can seduce man, but cannot become man.
FRANZ KAFKA

I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently fr...
FRANZ KAFKA

He is terribly afraid of dying because he hasn’t yet lived.
FRANZ KAFKA

Even if no salvation should come, I want to be worthy of it at every moment.
FRANZ KAFKA

Every word first looks around in every direction before letting itself be written down by me.
FRANZ KAFKA

I have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that...
FRANZ KAFKA

Most men are not wicked... They are sleep-walkers, not evil evildoers.
FRANZ KAFKA

We are sinful not only because we have eaten of the Tree of Knowledge, but also because we have not ...
FRANZ KAFKA

Let me remind you of the old maxim: people under suspicion are better moving than at rest, since at ...
FRANZ KAFKA

My ''fear''... is my substance, and probably the best part of me.
FRANZ KAFKA

The true way is along a rope that is not spanned high in the air, but only just above the ground. It...
FRANZ KAFKA

What have I in common with Jews? I have hardly anything in common with myself
FRANZ KAFKA

Leopards break into the temple and drink the sacrificial chalices dry; this occurs repeatedly, again...
FRANZ KAFKA

People label themselves with all sorts of adjectives. I can only pronounce myself as 'nauseatingly m...
FRANZ KAFKA

In general I lacked principally the ability to provide even in the slightest detail for the real fut...
FRANZ KAFKA

Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.
FRANZ KAFKA

Intrusive, thoughtless people!" said K. as he turned back into the room. The supervisor may have agr...
FRANZ KAFKA

If a man has his eyes bound, you can encourage him as much as you like to stare through the bandage,...
FRANZ KAFKA

What's happened to me,' he thought. It was no dream.
FRANZ KAFKA

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a ...
FRANZ KAFKA

A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity."

[Letter to Max Brod, July 5,...
FRANZ KAFKA

What a fate: to be condemned to work for a firm where the slightest negligence at once gave rise to ...
FRANZ KAFKA

You spend too much time on ephemeras. The majority of modern books are merely wavering reflections o...
FRANZ KAFKA

Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he ...
FRANZ KAFKA

Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul acco...
FRANZ KAFKA

If I didn't have my parents to think about I'd have given in my notice a long time ago, I'd have gon...
FRANZ KAFKA

The books we need are of the kind that act upon us like a misfortune,that makes us suffer like the d...
FRANZ KAFKA

I am so miserable, there are so many questions, I can see no way out and am so wretched and feeble t...
FRANZ KAFKA

Hombro con hombro, una cadena de hermanos, una sangre no ya encerrada en la mezquina circulación de...
FRANZ KAFKA

The Expulsion from Paradise is eternal in its principal aspect: this makes it irrevocable, and our l...
FRANZ KAFKA

The fact that our task is exactly commensurate with our life gives it the appearance of being infini...
FRANZ KAFKA

People who walk across dark bridges, past saints,
with dim, small lights.
Clouds which mov...
FRANZ KAFKA

...the books we need are the kind that act upon us like a misfortune, that make us suffer like the d...
FRANZ KAFKA

I do not read advertisements - I would spend all my time wanting things
FRANZ KAFKA

Productivity is being able to do things that you were never able to do before.
FRANZ KAFKA

You are free and that is why you are lost
FRANZ KAFKA

Isn't it only natural to leave a place where one is so bitterly hated?...The heroism involved in sta...
FRANZ KAFKA

There will be no proof that I ever was a writer
FRANZ KAFKA

Where was the judge he'd never seen? Where was the high court he had never reached?
FRANZ KAFKA

Always first draw fresh breath after outbursts of vanity and complacency.
FRANZ KAFKA

Herr Kafka, essen Sie keine Eier." (As one and only piece of dialog K recalls from his meeting with ...
FRANZ KAFKA

It is only because of their stupidity that they are able to be so sure of themselves.
FRANZ KAFKA

sleep is the most innocent creature there is and a sleepless man
the most guilty.
FRANZ KAFKA

Ali svi se slažu u tome da se ne podižu lakomislene optužbe i da se sud, kad jedanput nekog optu�...
FRANZ KAFKA

I miss you deeply, unfathomably, senselessly, terribly.
FRANZ KAFKA

So perhaps the best resource is to meet everything passively, to make yourself an inert mass, to sta...
FRANZ KAFKA

4 December. To die would mean nothing else than to surrender a nothing to the nothing, but that woul...
FRANZ KAFKA

I am a very unhappy human being and you, dearest, simply had to be summoned to create an equilibrium...
FRANZ KAFKA

One advantage in keeping a diary is that you become aware with reassuring clarity of the changes whi...
FRANZ KAFKA

In our folk nobody has any experience of youth, there’s barely even any time for being a toddler. ...
FRANZ KAFKA

Books are a narcotic.
FRANZ KAFKA

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us.
FRANZ KAFKA

Die schwere Verwundung Gregors, an der er über einen Monat litt -- der
Apfel blieb, da ihn nie...
FRANZ KAFKA

Don't despair, not even over the fact that you don't despair
FRANZ KAFKA

Today one may pluck out one's very heart and not find it.
FRANZ KAFKA

I was heading for the city in the south, of which they used to say in our village:
‘There are...
FRANZ KAFKA

Isn’t it obvious that a person would leave from where he is hated so much? The heroism of staying ...
FRANZ KAFKA

The meaning of life is that it stops
FRANZ KAFKA

It occurs to me that I really can't remember your face in any precise detail. Only the way you walke...
FRANZ KAFKA

There is nothing besides a spiritual world; what we call the world of the senses is the Evil in the ...
FRANZ KAFKA

I need solitude for my writing; not 'like a hermit' - that wouldn't be enough - but like a dead man.
FRANZ KAFKA

Hesitation before birth. If there is a transmigration of souls then I am not yet on the bottom rung....
FRANZ KAFKA

If there is a transmigration of souls then I am not yet on the bottom rung. My life is a hesitation ...
FRANZ KAFKA

One idiot is one idiot. Two idiots are two idiots. Ten thousand idiots are a political party.
FRANZ KAFKA

Kill me, or you are a murderer.
FRANZ KAFKA

Just think how many thoughts a blanket smothers while one lies alone in bed, and how many unhappy dr...
FRANZ KAFKA

I never wish to be easily defined. I’d rather float over other people’s minds as something stric...
FRANZ KAFKA

Al in de vroege ochtend, het was bijna nog nacht, had Gregor de gelegenheid de kracht van zijn zojui...
FRANZ KAFKA

It puzzled K., at least it puzzled him looking at it from the policemen's point of view, that they h...
FRANZ KAFKA

He thought back on his family with deep emotion and love. His conviction that he would have to disap...
FRANZ KAFKA

I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot ...
FRANZ KAFKA

All language is but a poor translation.
FRANZ KAFKA

Yours

(now I'm even losing my name - it was getting shorter and shorter all the time and ...
FRANZ KAFKA

From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back.
FRANZ KAFKA

I can’t think of any greater happiness than to be with you all the time, without interruption, end...
FRANZ KAFKA

I have this vision: That I would finally come and find you. Scattered pieces of distance would not s...
FRANZ KAFKA

They no longer wanted to entice anyone; all they wanted was to catch a glimpse for as long as possib...
FRANZ KAFKA

Am I to leave this world as a man who shies away from all conclusions?
FRANZ KAFKA

Please — consider me a dream.
FRANZ KAFKA

Now the Sirens have a still more fatal weapon than their song, namely their silence... someone might...
FRANZ KAFKA

Atata timp cat nu incetezi s urci, treptele nu se vOr termina; sub pasii tai care urca, ele se vOr i...
FRANZ KAFKA

For myself I am too heavy, and for you too light.
FRANZ KAFKA

Paths are made by walking
FRANZ KAFKA

In a certain sense the Good is comfortless.
FRANZ KAFKA

Woman, or more precisely put, perhaps, marriage, is the representative of life with which you are me...
FRANZ KAFKA

I am dirty, Milena, endlessly dirty, that is why I make such a fuss about cleanliness. None sing as ...
FRANZ KAFKA

I can’t feel a thing; All mournful petal storms are dancing inside the very private spring of my h...
FRANZ KAFKA

Auch ist es vielleicht nicht eigentlich Liebe wenn ich sage, daß Du mir das Liebste bist; Liebe ist...
FRANZ KAFKA

We're not used to thinking of vegetables in creative ways, and consequently the flavors are boring.
BARBARA KAFKA

This was one time I didn't have to fight to keep my book healthy. It came easily. All those vegetabl...
BARBARA KAFKA

And the lime juice is very important, too it brings the taste forward in the mouth.
BARBARA KAFKA

It's entirely conceivable that life's splendor surrounds us all, and always in its complete fullness...
GUSTAV KAFKA

The character of instrumental music... lets the emotions radiate and shine in their own character wi...
FRANZ LISZT

You even called me stupid in your verse, and I'm almost agreeing, for where stupidity is involve...
FRANZ GRILLPARZER

Happy is the man who finds a true friend, and far happier is he who finds that true friend in his wi...
FRANZ SCHUBERT

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.

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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

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