Franz Kafka Quotes - Page 3

Could K. represent the congregation all by himself? What if he had been a stranger merely visiting the church? That was more or less his position.

One idiot is one idiot. Two idiots are two idiots. Ten thousand idiots are a political party.

Am I to leave this world as a man who shies away from all conclusions?

I am a typical example of Western Jew. This means I don't have a moment of peace, that nothing has come easily to me, not just the present and the future, but even the past, that thing that each man receives as his birth-right: even that I have to conquer, and perhaps that is the hardest task.

L'éternité, c'est long ... surtout vers la fin.

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

Most men are not wicked... They are sleep-walkers, not evil evildoers.

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

Books are a narcotic.

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

A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity.", July 5, 1922]

A man might find for a moment that he was unable to work, but that's exactly the right time to remember his past accomplishments and to consider that later on, when the obstacles has been removed, he's bound to work all the harder and more efficiently.

The person I am in the company of my sisters has been entirely different from the person I am in the company of other people. Fearless, powerful, surprising, moved as I otherwise am only when I write.

When the little mouse, which was loved as none other was in the mouse-world, got into a trap one night and with a shrill scream forfeited its life for the sight of the bacon, all the mice in the district, in their holes were overcome by trembling and shaking; with eyes blinking uncontrollably they gazed at each other one by one, while their tails scraped the ground busily and senselessly. Then they came out, hesitantly, pushing one another, all drawn towards the scene of death. There it lay, the dear little mouse, its neck caught in the deadly iron, the little pink legs drawn up, and now stiff the feeble body that would so well have deserved a scrap of bacon.The parents stood beside it and eyed their child's remains.

In a way, I was safe writing

One of the first signs of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die. This life appears unbearable, another unattainable. One is no longer ashamed of wanting to die; one asks to be moved from the old cell, which one hates, to a new one, which one willl only in time come to hate. In this there is also a residue of belief that during the move the master will chance to come along the corridor, look at the prisoner and say: "This man is not to be locked up again, He is to come with me.

Each of us has his own way of emerging from the underworld, mine is by writing. That's why the only way I can keep going, if at all, is by writing, not through rest and sleep. I am far more likely to achieve peace of mind through writing than the capacity to write through peace.

But what if all the tranquility, all the comfort, all the contentment were now to come to a horrifying end?

It would have been so pointless to kill himself that, even if he had wanted to, the pointlessness would have made him unable.

The Expulsion from Paradise is eternal in its principal aspect: this makes it irrevocable, and our living in this world inevitable, but the eternal nature of the process has the effect that not only could we remain forever in Paradise, but that we are currently there, whether we know it or not.

Isolation is a way to know ourselves.

I have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe.

The meaning of life is that it stops.