Franz Kafka

Austria
3 Jul 1883 // 3 Jun 1924
Writer

Quotes

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I'm thinking only of my illness and my health, though both, the first as well as the second, are you.

Letters to Milena
If a man has his eyes bound, you can encourage him as much as you like to stare through the bandage, but he'll never see anything.

The Castle
Forget everything. Open the windows. Clear the room. The wind blows through it. You see only its emptiness, you search in every corner and don�t find yourself.

Diaries
It is not necessary to accept everything as true, one must only accept it as necessary.

The Trial
Being alone has a power over me that never fails. My interior dissolves (for the time being only superficially) and is ready to release what lies deeper. When I am willfully alone, a slight ordering of my interior begins to take place and I need nothing more.

Diaries
My doubts stand in a circle around every word, I see them before I see the word, but what then! I do not see the word at all, I invent it.

Diaries
Should I be grateful or should I curse the fact that despite all misfortune I can still feel love, an unearthly love but still for earthly objects.

Diaries
I see, these books are probably law books, and it is an essential part of the justice dispensed here that you should be condemned not only in innocence but also in ignorance.

The Trial
Sleep is the most innocent creature there is and a sleepless man the most guilty.

Letters to Milena
In a way, you are poetry material; You are full of cloudy subtleties I am willing to spend a lifetime figuring out. Words burst in your essence and you carry their dust in the pores of your ethereal individuality.

Letters to Milena
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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