Franz Kafka Quotes

Productivity is being able to do things that you were never able to do before.

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

Don Quixote's misfortune is not his imagination, but Sancho Panza.

By imposing too great a responsibility, or rather, all responsibility, on yourself, you crush yourself.

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

A book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us.

I do not read advertisements. I would spend all of my time wanting things.

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

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

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

Self-control means wanting to be effective at some random point in the infinite radiations of my spiritual existence.

God gives the nuts, but he does not crack them.

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.

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.

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

A man of action forced into a state of thought is unhappy until he can get out of it.

Anyone who cannot come to terms with his 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 note down what he sees among the ruins.

A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.

So long as you have food in your mouth, you have solved all questions for the time being.

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

Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.

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

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.

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.

By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.