Franz Kafka

Austria
3 Jul 1883 // 3 Jun 1924
Writer

Quotes

<< Prev Next >>

But when I want to draw close to someone, and fully commit myself, then my misery is assured. Then I am nothing, and what can I do with nothingness?

Letters to Felice‎
Don't despair, not even over the fact that you don't despair. Just when everything seems over with, new forces come marching up, and precisely that means that you are alive. And if they don't, then everything is over with here, once and for all.

Diaries
That is a very poor career, but only a poor career give the world the light that an imperfect, but pretty good writer wants to generate - at all costs, unfotunately.

Letters
My job is unbearable to me because it conflicts with my only desire and my only calling, which is literature. Since I am nothing but literature and can and want to be nothing else, my job will never take possession of me, it may, however, shatter me completely, and this is by no means a remote possibility.

Diaries
I ought to be able to invent words capable of blowing the odor of corpses in a direction other than straight into mine and the reader's face.

Diaries
Don't demand any sincerity from me, Milena. No one can demand it from me more than I myself and yet many things elude me, I'm sure, perhaps everything eludes me.

Letters to Milena
It seems to be a fact that man, tortured by his demons, avenges himself blindly on his fellow-man.

Letters to Milena
Nothing unites two people so completely, especially if, like you and me, all they have is words.

Letters to Felice‎
Illusions are more common than changes in fortune.

The Castle
My condition is not unhappiness, but it is also not happiness, not indifference, not weakness, not fatigue, not another interest � so what is it then?

Diaries
<< Prev Next >>
Search

 

On Anger: "For every minute you remain angry, you give up sixty seconds of peace of mind."
Essays
On Destiny: "Our destiny exercises its influence over us even when, as yet, we have not learned its nature: it is our future that lays down the law of our today."
Human, All Too Human
On Friendship: "A crowd is not company; and faces are but a gallery of pictures; and talk but a tinkling cymbal, where there is no love."
Essays