Franz Kafka Quotes - Page 7

One of the most effective means of seduction that Evil has is the challenge to struggle. It is like the struggle with women, whichends in bed. A married man's true deviations from the path of virtue are, rightly understood, never gay.

From the true antagonist illimitable courage is transmitted to you.

The spirit becomes free only when it ceases to be a support.

In a certain sense the Good is comfortless.

Art is for the artist is only suffering through which he releases himself for further suffering.

Kill me, or you are a murderer.

For words are magical formulae. They leave finger marks be hind on the brain, which in the twinkling of an eye become the footprints of history. One ought to watch one' s every word.

Alas," said the mouse, "the whole world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into." "You only need to change your direction," said the cat, and ate it up.

Celibacy and suicide are a similar levels of understanding, suicide and a martyr's death not so by any means, perhaps marriage and a martyr's death.

If something good has lost its way into you, it will make its escape overnight. I know you.

Picasso only registers the deformities which have not yet penetrated our consciousness. Art is a mirror which goes 'fast' like a watch - sometimes.

Marrying, founding a family, accepting all the children that come, supporting them in this insecure world, and perhaps even guiding them a little, is, I am convinced, the utmost a human being can succeed in doing at all.

To animalise is humane, to humanise is animal.

Two possibilities: making oneself infinitely small or being so. The second is perfection, that is to say, inactivity, the first is beginning, that is to say, action.

Evil is the starry sky of the Good.

Sometimes I think I can expiate all my past and future sins through the aching of my bones.

The limited circle is pure.

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

I made the remark that I don't avoid people in order to live quietly, but rather in order to be able to die quietly.

Writing [is] a form of prayer.

I'm thinking only of my illness and my health, though both, the first as well as the second, are you.

All human errors are impatience, a premature breaking off of methodical procedure, an apparent fencing-in of what is apparently at issue.

Believing in progress does not mean believing that any progress has yet been made.

When one has once accepted and absorbed Evil, it no longer demands to be believed.

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 speakes he lies.