55 Kafka Quotes to Inspire Deep Thought
Franz Kafka’s words capture the complexity of life, offering profound insights and thought-provoking reflections.
That’s why we’ve gathered all the best Kafka quotes for your next post.
And if you’re looking for short and meaningful sayings that resonate deeply, we also have you covered.
Now go ahead and browse through to find your favorite.
Kafka Quotes on Loneliness and Isolation
“My peers, lately, have found companionship through means of intoxication – it makes them sociable. I, however, cannot force myself to use drugs to cheat on my loneliness – it is all that I have – and when the drugs and alcohol dissipate, will be all that my peers have as well.”
“I do not speak as I think, I do not think as I should, and so it all goes on in helpless darkness.”
“Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.”
“Isolation is a way to know ourselves.”
“A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity.”
“Don’t despair, not even over the fact that you don’t despair.”
“You are free and that is why you are lost.”
“I miss you deeply, unfathomably, senselessly, terribly.”
“May I kiss you then? On this miserable paper? I might as well open the window and kiss the night air.”
“The meaning of life is that it stops.”
“One of the first signs of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.”
“Now the Sirens have a still more fatal weapon than their song, namely their silence someone might possibly have escaped from their singing but from their silence, certainly never.”
Kafka Quotes on Philosophy and Morality
“In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it’s the exact opposite.”
“Humility provides everyone, even him who despairs in solitude, with the strongest relationship to his fellow man, and this immediately, though, of course, only in the case of complete and permanent humility.”
“One must not cheat anybody, not even the world of one’s triumph.”
“There are some things one can only achieve by a deliberate leap in the opposite direction.”
“Suffering is the positive element in this world, indeed it is the only link between this world and the positive.”
“Believing in progress does not mean believing that any progress has yet been made.”
“First impressions are always unreliable.”
“Start with what is right rather than what is acceptable.”
“One must not cheat anybody, not even the world of one’s triumph.”
“A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul.”
“Don’t be too hasty, don’t take somebody else’s opinion without testing it.”
“The Bible is a sanctum; the world, sputum.”
“The limited circle is pure.”
“Sensual love deceives one as to the nature of heavenly love; it could not do so alone, but since it unconsciously has the element of heavenly love within it, it can do so.”
“Even the merest gesture is holy if it is filled with faith.”
“Hiding places there are innumerable, escape is only one, but possibilities of escape, again, are as many as hiding places.”
“Tyranny or slavery, born of selfishness, are the two educational methods of parents; all gradations of tyranny or slavery.”
“So long as you have food in your mouth, you have solved all questions for the time being.”
“One advantage in keeping a diary is that you become aware with reassuring clarity of the changes which you constantly suffer.”
“Association with human beings lures one into self-observation.”
“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.”
“In theory there is a possibility of perfect happiness: To believe in the indestructible element within one, and not to strive towards it.”
“Martyrs do not underrate the body, they allow it to be elevated on the cross. In this they are at one with their antagonists.”
“Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.”
“The mediation by the serpent was necessary. Evil can seduce man, but cannot become man.”
“Because of impatience we were driven out [of Paradise]; because of impatience we cannot return.”
Kafka Quotes on Passion and Obsession
“Follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”
“Follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”
“Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.”
“You are at once both the quiet and the confusion of my heart.”
“Productivity is being able to do things that you were never able to do before.”
“A lawyer is a person who writes a 10,000-word document and calls it a brief.”
“But what if all the tranquility, all the comfort, all the contentment were now to come to a horrifying end?”
“We all have wings, but they have not been of any avail to us and if we could tear them off, we would do so.”
“Youth is happy because it has the capacity to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.”
“Love is a drama of contradictions.”
“To die would mean nothing else than to surrender a nothing to the nothing, but that would be impossible to conceive, for how could a person, even only as a nothing, consciously surrender himself to the nothing, and not merely to an empty nothing but rather to a roaring nothing whose nothingness consists only in its incomprehensibility.”
“Dear Nephew, as you will already have realized during our much too brief companionship, I am essentially a man of principle. That is unpleasant and depressing not only to those who come in contact with me, but also to myself as well. Yet it is my principles that have made me what I am, and no one can ask me to deny my fundamental self. Not even you, my dear nephew.”
“I no longer know If I wish to drown myself in love, vodka or the sea.”
“I know of no greater happiness than to be with you all the time, without interruption, without end.”
“The crows maintain that a single crow could destroy the heavens. There is no doubt of that, but it proves nothing against the heavens, for heaven simply means: the impossibility of crows.”
“No matter how much you keep encouraging someone who is blindfolded to stare through the cloth, he still won’t see a thing.”
“A stair not worn hollow by footsteps is, regarded from its own point of view, only a boring something made of wood.”
