"Every word first looks around in every direction before letting itself be written down by me."
FR
Franz Kafka
30 quotes
Quotes by Franz Kafka
"Even the merest gesture is holy if it is filled with faith."
"I need solitude for my writing; not 'like a hermit' - that wouldn't be enough - but like a dead man."
"A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us."
"Books are a narcotic."
"We are sinful not only because we have eaten of the Tree of Knowledge, but also because we have not yet eaten of the Tree of Life. The state in which we are is sinful, irrespective of guilt."
"Evil does not exist; once you have crossed the threshold, all is good. Once in another world, you must hold your tongue."
"Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self."
"Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly."
"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 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."
"Youth is happy because it has the capacity to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old."
"The meaning of life is that it stops."
"He is terribly afraid of dying because he hasn’t yet lived."
"He is terribly afraid of dying because he hasn’t yet lived."
"The meaning of life is that it stops."
"I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us."
"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 speaks he lies."
"I am a cage, in search of a bird."
"A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity."[Letter to Max Brod, July 5, 1922]"