Franz Kafka Quotes - Page 3

Simply wait, be quiet, still The world will freely offer itself to you.

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

The meaning of life is that it stops.

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.

There are some things one can only achieve by a deliberate leap in the opposite direction.

No matter how much you keep encouraging someone who is blindfolded to stare through the cloth, he still won’t see a thing.".

Youth is happy because it has the ability to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.

We need the books that affect us like a disaster

Only the moment counts. It determines life.

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

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

I wanted to escape the unrest, to shut out the voices around me and within me, so I write.

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.

I lack nothing. I only needed myself.

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

Last night I dreamed about you. What happened in detail I can hardly remember, all I know is that we kept merging into one another. I was you, you were me. Finally you somehow caught fire.

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

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.

You are so vulnerably haunting. Your eeriness is terrifyingly irresistible.

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

Beyond a certain point there is no return. This point has to be reached.

I never imagined that so many days would ultimately make such a small life.

I am in chains. Don't touch my chains.

First impressions are always unreliable.

There's an infinite amount of hope but not for us.