Franz Kafka Quotes

My ‘fear’ is my substance, and probably the best part of me.

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

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

May I kiss you then? On this miserable paper? I might as well open the window and kiss the night air.

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

Anybody who preserves the ability to recognize beauty will never get old.

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

The indestructible is one: it is each individual human being and, at the same time, it is common to all, hence the incomparably indivisible union that exists between human beings.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

One must not cheat anyone, not even the world of its victory.

In a certain sense the Good is comfortless.

If there is a transmigration of souls then I am not yet on the bottom rung. My life is a hesitation before birth.

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