35 True Quotes by Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka (born July 3, 1883, Prague, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary – died June 3, 1924, Kierling, Austria) was a German-language novelist and short story writer regarded as one of the most significant authors of the 20th century.
Kafka’s best-known works include Die Verwandlung (1915; The Metamorphosis), Betrachtung (1912; Meditation), Der Process (1925; The Trial), Das Schloss (1926; The Castle), and Amerika (1927). The main themes of his novels and short stories are alienation, absurdity, guilt, and existential anxiety.
Key Takeaways
- His unique writing is considered the most influential in Western literature.
- During his lifetime, Kafka published just a few of his writings and was known only to a smaller group of readers.
- Although Kafka demanded the destruction of his unpublished manuscripts, his friend Max Brod published most of them after Kafka’s death.
Below is a collection of the best Franz Kafka quotes with sources and images.
You can read Franz Kafka quotes in German here and here.
Youth is happy, because it has the ability to see beauty. When this ability is lost, wretched old age begins, decay, unhappiness.Conversations with Kafka by Gustav Janouch (Frederick A. Praeger, ed. 1953), Page 33
Beyond a certain point there is no return. This point has to be reached.Dearest Father: Stories and Other Writings (Schocken Books, ed. 1954), Aphorisms 5, Page 35
It’s often safer to be in chains than to be free.The Trial (1925), (Alfred A. Knopf, ed. 1948), Chapter VIII, Page 237
Hiding places there are innumerable, escape is only one, but possibilities of escape, again, are as many as hiding places.Dearest Father: Stories and Other Writings (Schocken Books, ed. 1954), Aphorisms 26, Page 36
One of the first signs of the beginnings of understanding is the wish to die.Dearest Father: Stories and Other Writings (Schocken Books, ed. 1954), Aphorisms 13, Page 35
In the struggle between yourself and the world second the world.Dearest Father: Stories and Other Writings (Schocken Books, ed. 1954), Aphorisms 52, Page 39
The mediation by the serpent was necessary: Evil can seduce man, but cannot become man.Dearest Father: Stories and Other Writings (Schocken Books, ed. 1954), Aphorisms 51, Page 39
You have to hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world: this is something you are free to do and is in accord with your nature, but perhaps precisely this holding back is the only suffering that you might be able to avoid.Dearest Father: Stories and Other Writings (Schocken Books, ed. 1954), Aphorisms 103, Page 47
Believing in progress does not mean believing that progress has yet been made. That is not the sort of belief that indicates real faith.Dearest Father: Stories and Other Writings (Schocken Books, ed. 1954), Aphorisms 48, Page 39
We would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But 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.Letter to Oskar Pollak (January 27, 1904)
You are free and that is why you are lost.Dearest Father: Stories and Other Writings (Schocken Books, ed. 1954), Page 224
A belief is like a guillotine – as heavy, as light.Dearest Father: Stories and Other Writings (Schocken Books, ed. 1954), Aphorisms 87, Page 44
Association with human beings lures one into self-observation.Dearest Father: Stories and Other Writings (Schocken Books, ed. 1954), Aphorisms 77, Page 42
There is no need for you to leave the house. Stay at your table and listen. Don’t even listen, just wait. Don’t even wait, be completely quiet and alone. The world will offer itself to you to be unmasked; it can’t do otherwise; in raptures it will writhe before you.Dearest Father: Stories and Other Writings (Schocken Books, ed. 1954), Aphorisms 109, Page 48
There are only two things. Truth and lies. Truth is indivisible, hence it cannot recognize itself; anyone who wants to recognize it has to be a lie.Dearest Father: Stories and Other Writings (Schocken Books, ed. 1954), Page 83
Don’t despair, not even over the fact that you don’t despair.The Diaries Of Franz Kafka (1910-1913), (Schocken Books, ed. 1948), Diaries 1913 - July 21, Page 290
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Logic is doubtless unshakable, but it cannot withstand a man who wants to go on living.The Trial (1925), (Alfred A. Knopf, ed. 1948), Chapter X, Page 288
The history of mankind is the instant between two strides taken by a traveler.Dearest Father: Stories and Other Writings (Schocken Books, ed. 1954), Page 66
Idleness is the beginning of all vice, the crown of all virtues.Dearest Father: Stories and Other Writings (Schocken Books, ed. 1954), Page 78
The Revolution evaporates, and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.Conversations with Kafka by Gustav Janouch (Frederick A. Praeger, ed. 1953), Page 71
Most men are not wicked. Men become bad and guilty because they speak and act without foreseeing the results of their words and their deeds. They are sleep-walkers, not evildoers.Conversations with Kafka by Gustav Janouch (Frederick A. Praeger, ed. 1953), Page 58
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 (1926), (Alfred A. Knopf, ed. 1945), Chapter XV, Page 239
One must fight to get to the top, especially when one begins at the bottom?The Castle (1926), (Alfred A. Knopf, ed. 1945), Chapter XIII, Page 209
Sleep is the most innocent creature and sleepless man the most guilty.Letter to Milena (April-May 1920)
An ignorant man thinks everything possible.The Castle (1926), (Alfred A. Knopf, ed. 1945), Chapter IV, Page 74
Psychology is the description of the reflection of the terrestrial world in the heavenly plane, or, more correctly, the description of a reflection such as we, soaked as we are in our terrestrial nature, imagine it, for no reflection actually occurs, only we see earth wherever we turn.Dearest Father: Stories and Other Writings (Schocken Books, ed. 1954), Page 65
Religions get lost as people do.Dearest Father: Stories and Other Writings (Schocken Books, ed. 1954), Page 108
Tyranny or slavery, born of selfishness, are the two educational methods of parents; all gradations of tyranny or slavery.Letter to Elli Hermann (Prague, autumn 1921)
There are two main human sins, from which all the others derive: impatience and indolence.Dearest Father: Stories and Other Writings (Schocken Books, ed. 1954), Aphorisms 3, Page 34
One tells as few lies as possible only by telling as few lies as possible, and not by having the least possible opportunity to do so.Dearest Father: Stories and Other Writings (Schocken Books, ed. 1954), Aphorisms 58, Page 40
Woman, or more precisely put, perhaps, marriage, is the representative of life with which you are meant to come to terms.Dearest Father: Stories and Other Writings (Schocken Books, ed. 1954), Page 98
Evil is whatever distracts.Dearest Father: Stories and Other Writings (Schocken Books, ed. 1954), Page 75
The right perception of any matter and a misunderstanding of the same matter do not wholly exclude each other.The Trial (1925), (Alfred A. Knopf, ed. 1948), Chapter IX, Page 273
He who seeks does not find, but he who does not seek will be found.Dearest Father: Stories and Other Writings (Schocken Books, ed. 1954), Page 80
Disputed
People label themselves with all sorts of adjectives. I can only pronounce myself as ‘nauseatingly miserable beyond repair’.No source
Misattributed
One idiot is one idiot. Two idiots are two idiots. Ten thousand idiots are a political party.The quotation evolved from Let's Talk About the Elephant: Fragments of a Diary (1947) by Leo Longanesi (More info)
Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.Anne Rice (More info)
By believing passionately in something which still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.Nikos Kazantzakis, Report to Greco (1965), Page 434