Franz Kafka

If I shall exist eternally, how shall I exist tomorrow?

Youth is happy because it has the capacity to see beauty.

The Bible is a sanctum; the world, sputum.

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us.

Hold fast to the diary from today on! Write regularly! Don't surrender! Even if no salvation should come, I want to be worthy of it every moment.

I can’t think of any greater happiness than to be with you all the time, without interruption, endlessly, even though I feel that here in this world there’s no undisturbed place for our love, neither in the village nor anywhere else; and I dream of a grave, deep and narrow, where we could clasp each other in our arms as with clamps, and I would hide my face in you and you would hide your face in me, and nobody would ever see us any more.

So eager are our people to obliterate the present.

I can't feel a thing; All mournful petal storms are dancing inside the very private spring of my head.

I can once more carry on a conversation with myself, and don't stare so into complete emptiness. Only in this way is there any possibility of improvement for me.

Torment yourself as little as possible, then you'll torment me less.

Because of impatience we were driven out [of Paradise]; because of impatience we cannot return.

We need the books that affect us like a disaster

Man cannot live without a continuous confidence in something indestructible within himself.

Celibacy and suicide are a similar levels of understanding, suicide and a martyr's death not so by any means, perhaps marriage and a martyr's death.

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

A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul.

Sometimes I think I can expiate all my past and future sins through the aching of my bones.

Love has as few problems as a motor car. The only problems are the driver, the passengers, and the road.

Why do we complain about the Fall? It is not on its account that we were expelled from Paradise, but on account of the Tree of Life, lest we might eat of it.

The tremendous world I have inside my head. But how free myself and free it without being torn to pieces. And a thousand times rather be torn to pieces than retain it in me or bury it. That, indeed, is why I am here, that is quite clear to me.

From outside one will always triumphantly impress theories upon the world and then fall straight into the ditch one has dug, but only from inside will one keep oneself and the world quiet and true.