130 Best Franz Kafka Quotes That Are A Must-Read

Let’s see what thoughts lie behind these genius Franz Kafka quotes!

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The Top Picks From Franz Kafka Quotes

1. “A book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self.” ― Franz Kafka

2. “Books are a narcotic.” ― Franz Kafka

3. “They say ignorance is bliss…. they’re wrong ” ― Franz Kafka

4. “I am in chains. Don’t touch my chains.” ― Kafka, Franz

5. “Paths are made by walking” ― Franz Kafka

6. “Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.” ― Franz Kafka

7. “All language is but a poor translation.” ― Franz Kafka

8. “I am a cage, in search of a bird.” ― Franz Kafka

9. “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.” ― Franz Kafka

10. “I am free and that is why I am lost.” ― Franz Kafka

Famous Franz Kafka Quotes

1. “Youth is happy because it has the capacity to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.” ― Franz Kafka

2. “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.” ― Franz Kafka

3. “I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy.” ― Franz Kafka

4. “By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.” ― Franz Kafka

5. “I usually solve problems by letting them devour me.” ― Franz Kafka

6. “I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us.” ― Franz Kafka

7. “This tremendous world I have inside of me. How to free myself, and this world, without tearing myself to pieces. And rather tear myself to a thousand pieces than be buried with this world within me.” ― Kafka Franz, Diaries, 1910-1923

8. “I need solitude for my writing; not ‘like a hermit’ – that wouldn’t be enough – but like a dead man.” ― Franz Kafka

9. “April 27. Incapable of living with people, of speaking. Complete immersion in myself, thinking of myself. Apathetic, witless, fearful. I have nothing to say to anyone – never.” ― Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910-1923

10. “In man’s struggle against the world, bet on the world.” ― Franz Kafka

11. “People label themselves with all sorts of adjectives. I can only pronounce myself as ‘nauseatingly miserable beyond repair’.” ― Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910-1923

12. “We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.” ― Franz Kafka

13. “Do you know, darling? When you became involved with others you quite possibly stepped down a level or two, but If you become involved with me, you will be throwing yourself into the abyss.” ― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

14. “sleep is the most innocent creature there is and a sleepless man the most guilty.” ― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

15. “I’m doing badly, I’m doing well, whichever you prefer.” ― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

16. “They’re talking about things of which they don’t have the slightest understanding, anyway. It’s only because of their stupidity that they’re able to be so sure of themselves.” ― Franz Kafka, The Trial

17. “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.” ― Franz Kafka

18. “When one is alone, imperfection must be endured every minute of the day; a couple, however, does not have to put up with it. Aren’t our eyes made to be torn out, and our hearts for the same purpose? At the same time it’s really not that bad; that’s an exaggeration and a lie, everything is exaggeration, the only truth is longing. But even the truth of longing is not so much its own truth; it’s really an expression for everything else, which is a lie. This sounds crazy and distorted, but it’s true. Moreover, perhaps it isn’t love when I say you are what I love the most – you are the knife I turn inside myself, this is love. This, my dear, is love.” ― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

19. “My guiding principle is this: Guilt is never to be doubted.” ― Franz Kafka

20. “Please — consider me a dream.” ― Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka Love Quotes

1. “I miss you deeply, unfathomably, senselessly, terribly.” ― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

2. “I can’t think of any greater happiness than to be with you all the time, without interruption, endlessly, even though I feel that here in this world there’s no undisturbed place for our love, neither in the village nor anywhere else; and I dream of a grave, deep and narrow, where we could clasp each other in our arms as with clamps, and I would hide my face in you and you would hide your face in me, and nobody would ever see us any more.” ― Franz Kafka, Franz Kafka’s The Castle

3. “Love is, that you are the knife which I plunge into myself.” ― Franz Kafka

4. “You are at once both the quiet and the confusion of my heart.” ― Franz Kafka

5. “You are the knife I turn inside myself; that is love. That, my dear, is love.” ― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

6. “Better to have, and not need, than to need, and not have.” ― Franz Kafka

7. “May I kiss you then? On this miserable paper? I might as well open the window and kiss the night air.” ― Franz Kafka

8. “Written kisses don’t reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by the ghosts.” ― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

9. “I want in fact more of you. In my mind I am dressing you with light; I am wrapping you up in blankets of complete acceptance and then I give myself to you. ” ― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

10. “Yours

(now I’m even losing my name – it was getting shorter and shorter all the time and is now: Yours)” ― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

11. “Love is a drama of contradictions.” ― Franz Kafka

12. “Dear Milena,

I wish the world were ending tomorrow. Then I could take the next train, arrive at your doorstep in Vienna, and say: “Come with me, Milena. We are going to love each other without scruples or fear or restraint. Because the world is ending tomorrow.” Perhaps we don’t love unreasonably because we think we have time, or have to reckon with time. But what if we don’t have time? Or what if time, as we know it, is irrelevant? Ah, if only the world were ending tomorrow. We could help each other very much.” ― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

13. “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.” ― Franz Kafka

14. “You are at once both the quiet and the confusion of my heart; imagine my heartbeat when you are in this state.” ― Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice

15. “I can love only what I can place so high above me that I cannot reach it.” ― Franz Kafka

16. “He thought back on his family with deep emotion and love. His conviction that he would have to disappear was, if possible, even firmer than his sister’s. He remained in this state of empty and peaceful reflection until the tower clock struck three in the morning. He still saw that outside the window everything was beginning to grow light. Then, without his consent, his head sank down to the floor, and from his nostrils streamed his last weak breath.” ― Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis

17. “In a way, you are poetry material; You are full of cloudy subtleties I am willing to spend a lifetime figuring out. Words burst in your essence and you carry their dust in the pores of your ethereal individuality.” ― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

18. “I’m tired, can’t think of anything and want only to lay my face in your lap, feel your hand on my head and remain like that through all eternity.” ― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

19. “There is an infinite amount of hope in the universe … but not for us.” ― Franz Kafka

20. “I long for you; I who usually longs without longing, as though I am unconscious and absorbed in neutrality and apathy, really, utterly long for every bit of you.” ― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

Franz Kafka Philosophy Quotes

1. “Beyond a certain point there is no return. This point has to be reached.” ― Franz Kafka

2. “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 the deepest darkness.” ― Franz Kafka

3. “The meaning of life is that it stops.” ― Franz Kafka

4. “I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones. Basically it is nothing other than this fear we have so often talked about, but fear spread to everything, fear of the greatest as of the smallest, fear, paralyzing fear of pronouncing a word, although this fear may not only be fear but also a longing for something greater than all that is fearful.” ― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

5. “Most men are not wicked… They are sleep-walkers, not evil evildoers.” ― Franz Kafka

6. “You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid.” ― Franz Kafka

7. “I never wish to be easily defined. I’d rather float over other people’s minds as something strictly fluid and non-perceivable; more like a transparent, paradoxically iridescent creature rather than an actual person.” ― Franz Kafka

8. “I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need 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 within us. That is my belief.” ― Franz Kafka

9. “We are as forlorn as children lost in the wood. When you stand in front of me and look at me, what do you know of the griefs that are in me and what do I know of yours? And if I were to cast myself down before you and tell you, what more would you know about me that you know about Hell when someone tells you it is hot and dreadful?” ― Franz Kafka

10. “The limited circle is pure.” ― Franz Kafka

11. “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.” ― Franz Kafka

12. “There are two cardinal sins from which all others spring: Impatience and Laziness.” ― Franz Kafka

13. “It certainly was not my intention to make you suffer, yet i have done so; obviously it never will be my intention to make you suffer, yet I shall always do so.” ― Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice

14. “Forget everything. Open the windows. Clear the room. The wind blows through it. You see only its emptiness, you search in every corner and don’t find yourself.” ― Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910-1923

15. “Even if no salvation should come, I want to be worthy of it at every moment.” ― Franz Kafka

16. “The books we need are of the kind that act upon us like a misfortune, that makes 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, lost in a forest remote from all human habitation.” ― Franz Kafka, The Trial

17. “Being alone has a power over me that never fails. My interior dissolves (for the time being only superficially) and is ready to release what lies deeper. When I am willfully alone, a slight ordering of my interior begins to take place and I need nothing more.” ― Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910-1923

18. “Anyone who cannot cope with life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate…but with his other hand he can jot down what he sees among the ruins, for he sees different and more things than the others; after all, he is dead in his own lifetime and the real survivor.” ― Franz Kafka

19. “Nothing unites two people so completely, especially if, like you and me, all they have is words.” ― Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice

20. “The right understanding of any matter and a misunderstanding of the same matter do not wholly exclude each other.” ― Franz Kafka, The Trial

Franz Kafka Quotes About Life

1. “I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.” ― Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis

2. “You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.” ― Franz Kafka

3. “It’s only because of their stupidity that they’re able to be so sure of themselves.” ― Franz Kafka, The Trial

4. “He is terribly afraid of dying because he hasn’t yet lived.” ― Franz Kafka

5. “How about if I sleep a little bit longer and forget all this nonsense.” ― Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis

6. “My peers, lately, have found companionship through means of intoxication–it makes them sociable. I, however, cannot force myself to use drugs to cheat on my loneliness–it is all that I have–and when the drugs and alcohol dissipate, will be all that my peers have as well.” ― Franz Kafka

7. “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.” ― Franz Kafka

8. “Just think how many thoughts a blanket smothers while one lies alone in bed, and how many unhappy dreams it keeps warm.” ― Franz Kafka, The Complete Stories

9. “Logic may indeed be unshakeable, but it cannot withstand a man who is determined to live.” ― Franz Kafka, The Trial

10. “For myself I am too heavy, and for you too light.” ― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

11. “The Kafka paradox: art depends on truth, but truth, being indivisible, cannot know itself: to tell the truth is to lie. thus the writer is the truth, and yet when he speaks he lies.” ― Franz Kafka

12. “I have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe.” ― Franz Kafka

13. “Every thing you love is very likely to be lost, but in the end, love will return in a different way.” ― Franz Kafka, Kafka’s Selected Stories: A Norton Critical Edition

14. “No,” said the priest, “you don’t need to accept everything as true, you only have to accept it as necessary.” “Depressing view,” said K. “The lie made into the rule of the world.” ― Franz Kafka, The Trial

15. “You misinterpret everything, even the silence.” ― Franz Kafka, The Castle

16. “Believing in progress does not mean believing that any progress has yet been made.” ― Franz Kafka

17. “Life’s splendor forever lies in wait about each one of us in all its fullness, but veiled from view, deep down, invisible, far off. It is there, though, not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If you summon it by the right word, by its right name, it will come.” ― Franz Kafka, Diaries of Franz Kafka 1914-1923

18. “Hold fast to the diary from today on! Write regularly! Don’t surrender! Even if no salvation should come, I want to be worthy of it every moment.” ― Franz Kafka

19. “Sometimes I have the feeling that we’re in one room with two opposite doors and each of us holds the handle of one door, one of us flicks an eyelash and the other is already behind his door, and now the first one has but to utter a word ad immediately the second one has closed his door behind him and can no longer be seen. He’s sure to open the door again for it’s a room which perhaps one cannot leave. If only the first one were not precisely like the second, if he were calm, if he would only pretend not to look at the other, if he slowly set the room in order as though it were a room like any other; but instead he does exactly the same as the other at his door, sometimes even both are behind the doors and the the beautiful room is empty.” ― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

20. “You can choose to be free , but it’s last decision you’ll ever make” ― Kafka

Incredible Franz Kafka Quotes

1. “Even the merest gesture is holy if it is filled with faith.” ― Franz Kafka

2. “I can’t feel a thing; All mournful petal storms are dancing inside the very private spring of my head.” ― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

3. “The sister played so beautifully. Her face was tilted to one side and she followed the notes with soulful and probing eyes. Gregor advanced a little, keeping his eyes low so that they might possibly meet hers. Was he a beast if music could move him so?” ― Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis

4. “One has either to take people as they are, or leave them as they are. One cannot change them, one can merely disturb their balance. A human being, after all, is not made up of single pieces, from which a single piece can be taken out and replaced by something else.” ― Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice

5. “Go on caring for me.” ― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

6. “I don’t feel particularly proud of myself. But when I walk alone in the woods or lie in the meadows, all is well.” ― Franz Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors

7. “You must not pay too much attention to opinions. The written word is unalterable, and opinions are often only an expression of despair.” ― Franz Kafka, The Trial

8. “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.” ― Franz Kafka, Blue Octavo Notebooks

9. “My condition is not unhappiness, but it is also not happiness, not indifference, not weakness, not fatigue, not another interest – so what is it then?” ― Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910-1923

10. “Nor is it perhaps really love when I say that for me you are the most beloved.” ― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

11 “Self-control is something for which I do not strive. Self-control means wanting to be effective at some random point in the infinite radiations of my spiritual existence.” ― Franz Kafka

12. “There’s no quiet place here on earth for our love, not in the village and not anywhere else, so I picture a grave, deep and narrow, in which we embrace as if clamped together, I bury my face against you, you yours against me, and no one will ever see us.” ― Franz Kafka, The Castle

13. “What a fate: to be condemned to work for a firm where the slightest negligence at once gave rise to the gravest suspicion! Were all the employees nothing but a bunch of scoundrels, was there not among them one single loyal devoted man who, had he wasted only an hour or so of the firm’s time in the morning, was so tormented by conscience as to be driven out of his mind and actually incapable of leaving his bed?” ― Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis

14. “And don’t demand any sincerity from me, Milena. No one can demand it from me more than I myself and yet many things elude me, I’m sure, perhaps everything eludes me.” ― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

15. “Writing is prayer.” ― Franz Kafka

16. “I can’t think of anything to write about, I’m just walking around here between the lines, under the light of your eyes, in the breadth of your mouth as in a beautiful happy day, which remains beautiful and happy, even when the head is sick and tired.” ― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

17. “I only fear danger where I want to fear it.” ― Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis

18. “I am too tired, I must try to rest and sleep, otherwise I am lost in every respect. What an effort to keep alive! Erecting a monument does not require an expenditure of so much strength.” ― Franz Kafka

19. “You once said that you would like to sit beside me while I write. Listen, in that case I could not write at all. For writing means revealing oneself to excess; that utmost of self-revelation and surrender, in which a human being, when involved with others, would feel he was losing himself, and from which, therefore, he will always shrink as long as he is in his right mind– for everyone wants to live as long as he is alive– even the degree of self-revelation and surrender is not enough for writing.

Writing that springs from the surface of existence– when there is no other way and deeper wells have dried up– is nothing, and collapses the moment a truer emotion makes the surface shake. That is why one can never be alone enough when one writes, why there can never be enough silence around one when one writes, why even night is not night enough.” ― Franz Kafka

20. “One idiot is one idiot. Two idiots are two idiots. Ten thousand idiots are a political party.” ― Franz Kafka

Wise Franz Kafka Quotes

1. “First impressions are always unreliable.” ― Franz Kafka

2. “Kill me, or you are a murderer.” ― Franz Kafka

3. “I am dirty, Milena, endlessly dirty, that is why I make such a fuss about cleanliness. None sing as purely as those in deepest hell; it is their singing we take for the singing of angels.” ― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

4. “All I am is literature, and I am not able or willing to be anything else.” ― Franz Kafka

5. “What am I doing here in this endless winter?” ― Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis and Other Stories

6. “A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity. [Letter to Max Brod, July 5, 1922]” ― Franz Kafka

7. “One of the first signs of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die. This life appears unbearable, another unattainable. One is no longer ashamed of wanting to die; one asks to be moved from the old cell, which one hates, to a new one, which one willl only in time come to hate. In this there is also a residue of belief that during the move the master will chance to come along the corridor, look at the prisoner and say: “This man is not to be locked up again, He is to come with me.” ― Franz Kafka, Blue Octavo Notebooks

8. “We are as forlorn as children lost in the woods. When you stand in front of me and look at me, what do you know of the griefs that are in me and what do I know of yours. And if I were to cast myself down before you and weep and tell you, what more would you know about me than you know about Hell when someone tells you it is hot and dreadful? For that reason alone we human beings ought to stand before one another as reverently, as reflectively, as lovingly, as we would before the entrance to Hell.” ― Franz Kafka

9. “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.” ― Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910-1923

10. “Evil is whatever distracts.” ― Franz Kafka

11. “Should I be grateful or should I curse the fact that despite all misfortune I can still feel love, an unearthly love but still for earthly objects.” ― Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910-1923

12. “But I’m not guilty,” said K. “there’s been a mistake. How is it even possible for someone to be guilty? We’re all human beings here, one like the other.” “That is true” said the priest “but that is how the guilty speak” ― Franz Kafka, The Trial

13. “The person I am in the company of my sisters has been entirely different from the person I am in the company of other people. Fearless, powerful, surprising, moved as I otherwise am only when I write.” ― Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910-1923

14. “I do not read advertisements. I would spend all of my time wanting things. ” ― Franz Kafka

15. “I lack nothing. I only needed myself.” ― Franz Kafka

16. “But sleep? On a night like this? What an idea! Just think of how many thoughts a blanket smothers while one lies alone in bed, and how many unhappy dreams it keeps warm.” ― Franz Kafka

17. “Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.” ― Franz Kafka

18. “If a man has his eyes bound, you can encourage him as much as you like to stare through the bandage, but he’ll never see anything.” ― Franz Kafka, The Castle

19. “Calm —indeed the calmest— reflection might be better than the most confused decisions” ― Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis

20. “So eager are our people to obliterate the present.” ― Franz Kafka

Final Word

Kafka’s ability to distill complex ideas into concise words is nothing short of magical.

Thanks for joining me on this adventure into the enigmatic world of Franz Kafka quotes. As Kafka once said, ‘I am a cage, in search of a bird.’ May you find your bird and soar to new heights. Cheers to the journey of continuous discovery!