Franz Kafka

Every thing that you love, you will eventually lose, but in the end, love will return in a different form.

Like tired dogs they stand there, because they use up all their strength in remaining upright in one's memory.

Human nature, essentially changeable, as unstable as the dust, can endure no restraint; if it binds itself it soon begins to tear madly at its bonds, until it rends everything asunder, the wall, the bonds, and its very self.

I never wish to be easily defined.

A book should serve as an axe to the ice inside us.

Every one of us has a bad conscience, which he tries to escape by going to sleep as quickly as possible.

I never wish to be easily defined. I’d rather float over other people’s minds as something strictly fluid and non-perceivable; more like a transparent, paradoxically iridescent creature rather than an actual person.

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

Isolation is a way to know ourselves.

The truth is always an abyss. One must — as in a swimming pool — dare to dive from the quivering springboard of trivial everyday experience and sink into the depths, in order to later rise again — laughing and fighting for breath — to the now doubly illuminated surface of things.

In a certain sense the Good is comfortless.

I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.

It receives you when you come and dismisses you when you go.

There is a destination but no way there; what we refer to as way is hesitation.

I am on the hunt for constructions. I come into a room and find them whitely merging in a corner.

If it had been possible to build the Tower of Babel without climbing it, it would have been permitted.

One must not cheat anyone, not even the world of its victory.

Youth is happy because it has the ability to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.

Simply wait, be quiet, still The world will freely offer itself to you.

I want in fact more of you. In my mind I am dressing you with light; I am wrapping you up in blankets of complete acceptance and then I give myself to you. I long for you; I who usually long without longing, as though I am unconscious and absorbed in neutrality and apathy, really, utterly long for every bit of you.

I do not speak as I think, I do not think as I should, and so it all goes on in helpless darkness.