Franz Kafka Quotes That Will Inspire You to Live Your Best Life

1. How suicidal happiness can be! The Castle

2. I am too tired, I must try to rest and sleep, otherwise I am lost in every respect. What an effort to keep alive! Erecting a monument does not require an expenditure of so much strength.

3. 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

4. May I kiss you then? On this miserable paper? I might as well open the window and kiss the night air.

5. The Kafka paradox: art depends on truth, but truth, being indivisable, cannot know itself: to tell the truth is to lie. thus the writer is the truth, and yet when he speaks he lies.

6. 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.

7. You are at once both the quiet and the confusion of my heart; imagine my heartbeat when you are in this state. Letters to Felice‎

8. You are the knife I turn inside myself; that is love. That, my dear, is love. Letters to Milena

9. Evil does not exist; once you have crossed the threshold, all is good. Once in another world, you must hold your tongue.

10. From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back.

11. I long for you; I who usually longs without longing, as though I am unconscious and absorbed in neutrality and apathy, really, utterly long for every bit of you. Letters to Milena

12. If it had been possible to build the Tower of Babel without ascending it, the work would have been permitted.(Wenn es möglich gewesen wäre, den Turm von Babel zu erbauern ohne ihn zu erklettern, es wäre erlaubt worden.) Parables and Paradoxes

13. It was very learned, but it didn't actually say anything. The Trial

14. Knowledge must seep into your blood, into your self, not just into your head, you must live it. Letters to Ottla and the Family

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

16. The hardest bones, containing the richest marrow, can be conquered only by a united crushing of all the teeth of all dogs. That of course is only a figure of speech and exaggerated; if all teeth were but ready they would not need even to bite, the bones would crack themselves and the marrow would be freely accessible to the feeblest of dogs. If I remain faithful to this metaphor, then the goal of my aims, my questions, my inquiries, appears monstrous, it is true. For I want to compel all dogs thus to assemble together, I want the bones to crack open under the pressure of their collective preparedness, and then I want to dismiss them to the ordinary life they love, while all by myself, quite alone, I lap up the marrow. That sounds monstrous, almost as if I wanted to feed on the marrow, not merely of bone, but of the whole canine race itself. But it is only a metaphor. The marrow that I am discussing here is no food; on the contrary, it is a poison. Investigations of a Dog