Franz Kafka Quotes - Page 10

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.

The dream reveals the reality which conception lags behind. That is the horror of life-the terror of art.

I won't give up the diary again. I must hold on here, it is the only place I can.

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

There was once a community of scoundrels, that is to say, they were not scoundrels, but ordinary people.

Humility provides everyone, even him who despairs in solitude, with the strongest relationship to his fellow man.

I like to make use of what I know

The true way goes over a rope which is not stretched at any great height but just above the ground. It seems more designed to make people stumble than to be walked upon.

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

A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul.

Writing is a deeper sleep than death. Just as one wouldn't pull a corpse from its grave, I can't be dragged from my desk at night.

All knowledge, the totality of all questions and all answers, is contained in the dog. If one could but realize this knowledge, if one could but bring it into the light of day, if we dogs would but own that we know infinitely more than we admit to ourselves!

Like tired dogs they stand there, because they use up all their strength in remaining upright in one's memory.

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

Some deny the existence of misery by pointing to the sun; he denies the existence of the sun by pointing to misery.

At that point I asked myself: How is it that she is not amazed at herself, that she keeps her lips closed and makes no such remark?

Human nature, essentially changeable, as unstable as the dust, can endure no restraint; if it binds itself it soon begins to tear madly at its bonds, until it rends everything asunder, the wall, the bonds, and its very self.

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.

But what if all the tranquility, all the comfort, all the contentment were now to come to a horrifying end?

it is not necessary to accept everything as true, one must only accept it as necessary.' 'A melancholy conclusion,' said K. 'It turns lying into a universal principle.

Writing is a sweet, wonderful reward.

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

Each of us has his own way of emerging from the underworld, mine is by writing. That's why the only way I can keep going, if at all, is by writing, not through rest and sleep. I am far more likely to achieve peace of mind through writing than the capacity to write through peace.

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

It's impossible to defend oneself in the absence of goodwill