928 Quotes by Franz Kafka

And actually it is not you at all I love, but rather the existence you have bestowed on me

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

You are the knife I turn inside myself; that is love. That, my dear, is love.

Human nature, essentially changeable, unstable as the dust, can endure no restraint; if it binds itself it soon begins to tear madly at its bonds, until it rends everything asunder, the wall, the bonds and its very self.(Das menschliche Wesen, leichtfertig in seinem Grund, von der Natur des auffliegenden Staubes, verträgt keine Fesselung; fesselt es sich selbst, wird es bald wahnsinnig an den Fesseln zu rütteln anfangen und Mauer, Kette und sich selbst in alle Himmelsrichtungen zerreißen.)

For humans the idea of freedom is all too often a means of deceiving themselves. And although freedom is among the most exalted of feelings, so is the illusion of freedom among the most exalted of illusions.

You are at once both the quiet and the confusion of my heart; imagine my heartbeat when you are in this state.

My money is in the hands of strangers.

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.

one must not prostrate oneself before the minor impossibilities, otherwise the major impossibilities would never come into view.