Franz Kafka

Believing in progress does not mean believing that any progress has yet been made.

Start with what is right rather than what is acceptable.

It is often safer to be in chains than to be free.

I do not read advertisements. I would spend all of my time wanting things.

So long as you have food in your mouth, you have solved all questions for the time being.

It would be very unjust to say that you deserted me, but that I was deserted, and sometimes terribly so, is true.

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.

Marrying, founding a family, accepting all the children that come, supporting them in this insecure world, and perhaps even guiding them a little, is, I am convinced, the utmost a human being can succeed in doing at all.

You see, I have only such a fugitive awareness of things around me that I always feel they were once real and are now fleeting away.

Art flies around truth, but with the definite intention of not getting burnt. Its capacity lies in finding in the dark void a place where the beam of light can be intensely caught, without this having been perceptible before.

So then you’re free?’ ‘Yes, I’m free,’ said Karl, and nothing seemed more worthless than his freedom.

At that point I asked myself: How is it that she is not amazed at herself, that she keeps her lips closed and makes no such remark?

Written kisses don't reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by the ghosts.

No one can crave what truly harms him.

Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self.

Every word first looks around in every direction before letting itself be written down by me.

there is nothing bad to fear; once you have crossed that threshold, all is well. Another world, and you do not have to speak

Leop­ards break in­to the tem­ple and drink all the sac­ri­fi­cial ves­sels dry; it keeps hap­pen­ing; in the end, it can be cal­cu­lat­ed in ad­vance and is in­cor­po­rat­ed in­to the rit­ual.

People keep themselves at a tolerable height above an infernal abyss toward which they gravitate only by putting out all their strength and lovingly helping one another. They are tied together by ropes, and it's bad enough when the ropes around an individual loosen and he drops somewhat lower than the others into empty space; ghastly when the ropes break and he falls. That's why we should cling to the others.

We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.

The purpose of a story is to be an axe that breaks up the ice within us.