928 Quotes by Franz Kafka

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

Written kisses don't reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by the ghosts.

I won't give up the diary again. I must hold on here, it is the only place I can.

We live in an age which is so possessed by demons, that soon we shall only be able to do goodness and justice in the deepest secrecy, as if it were a crime.

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.

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.

You are so vulnerably haunting. Your eeriness is terrifyingly irresistible.

The right understanding of any matter and a misunderstanding of the same matter do not wholly exclude each other.

Two tasks at the beginning of your life: to narrow your orbit more and more, and ever and again to check whether you are not in hiding somewhere outside your orbit.