Franz Kafka Quotes about Literature

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

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

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

The Bible is a sanctum; the world, sputum.

All I am is literature, and I am not able or willing to be anything else.

Evil is whatever distracts.

Association with human beings lures one into self-observation.

Not everyone can see the truth, but he can be it.

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

In a certain sense the Good is comfortless.

In the struggle between yourself and the world second the world.

Religions get lost as people do.

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

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

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

How can one take delight in the world unless one flees to it for refuge?

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

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

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

Writers speak stench.

Atlas was permitted the opinion that he was at liberty, if he wished, to drop the Earth and creep away; but this opinion was all that he was permitted.

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

How pathetically scanty my self-knowledge is compared with, say, my knowledge of my room. There is no such thing as observation of the inner world, as there is of the outer world.

Martyrs do not underrate the body, they allow it to be elevated on the cross. In this they are at one with their antagonists.

Nervous states of the worst sort control me without pause. Everything that is not literature bores me and I hate it. I lack all aptitude for family life except, at best, as an observer. I have no family feeling and visitors make me almost feel as though I were maliciously being attacked.