Franz Kafka Quotes - Page 11

Everyone carries a room about inside him. This fact can even be proved by means of the sense of hearing. If someone walks fast and one pricks up one’s ears and listens, say in the night, when everything round about is quiet, one hears, for instance, the rattling of a mirror not quite firmly fastened to the wall.

Nothing, you know, gives the body greater satisfaction than ordering people about, or at least believing in one's ability to do so.

Expulsion from Paradise is in its main aspect eternal: that is to say, although expulsion from Paradise is final, and life in theworld unavoidable, the eternity of the process (or, expressed in temporal terms, the eternal repetition of the process) nevertheless makes it possible not only that we might remain in Paradise permanently, but that we may in fact be there permanently, no matter whether we know it here or not.

Written kisses don't reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by the ghosts.

A man of action forced into a state of thought is unhappy until he can get out of it.

You see, I have only such a fugitive awareness of things around me that I always feel they were once real and are now fleeting away.

Believing means liberating the indestructible element in oneself, or, more accurately, liberating oneself, or, more accurately, being indestructible, or, more accurately, being.

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

. . . The books we need are the kind that act upon us like a misfortune, that make us suffer like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we were on the verge of suicide, or lost in a forest remote from all human habitation-a book should serve as an axe for the frozen sea within us.

There is a down-and-outness under true knowledge and a childlike happy arising from it.

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

It would have been so pointless to kill himself that, even if he had wanted to, the pointlessness would have made him unable.

Test yourself on mankind. It is something that makes the doubter doubt, the believer believe.

So then you’re free?’ ‘Yes, I’m free,’ said Karl, and nothing seemed more worthless than his freedom.

He is a free and secure citizen of the world because he is on a chain that is long enough to allow him access to all parts of the earth, and yet not so long that he could be swept over the edge of it.

No sooner said than done - so acts your man of worth.

And I leave my post of observation and find I have had enough of this outside life; I feel that there is nothing more that I can learn here, either now or at any time. And I long to say a last goodbye to everything up here, to go down into my burrow never to return again, let things take their course, and not try to retard them with my profitless vigils.

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.

May I kiss you then? On this miserable paper? I might as well open the window and kiss the night air.

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

We were created in order to live in Paradise, and Paradise was ordained to serve us. What was ordained for us has been changed; it is not said that this has also happened with what was ordained for Paradise.

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

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

There are two main human sins from which all the others derive: impatience and indolence. It was because of impatience that they were expelled from Paradise; it is because of indolence that they do not return. Yet perhaps there is only one major sin: impatience. Because of impatience they were expelled, because of impatience they do not return.

Writers speak stench.