928 Quotes by Franz Kafka

Other opportunities arise from time to time that almost don’t accord with the overall situation, opportunities whereby a word, a glance, a sigh of trust may achieve more than a lifetime of exhausting endeavour.

How badly I even read. And with what malice and weakness I observe myself. Apparently I cannot force my way into the world, but lie quietly, receive, spread out within me what I have received, and then step calmly forth.

Kafka’s fiction examines a universe largely unexplored in the literature preceding him, one full of implications that venture into the remote regions of human psychology. It’s a universe with different rules than those governing our reality. And there’s no map.

Now I can look at you in peace; I don’t eat you any more.

I have now, and have had since this afternoon, a great yearning to write all of my anxiety entirely out of me.

With a kind of perverse obstinancy his father refused to take off his official uniform even in the house; and while his robe hung uselessly on the clothes hook, his father dozed, completely dressed, in his chair, as if he were always ready for duty and were waiting even here for the voice of his superior.

For a man under suspicion movement is better than rest, for the man who is at rest can always, without knowing it, be on the scales being weighed together with his sins.

Don’t concern yourself about anybody. Just do what you think is right.

16 February. Can’t see my way clear. As though everything I possessed had escaped me, and as though it would hardly satisfy me if it all returned.