Franz Kafka Quotes

What about sleeping a little longer and forgetting all this nonsense.

What a fate, to be condemned to work for a firm where the smallest omission at once gave rise to the gravest suspicion!

The right perception of any matter and a misunderstanding of the same matter do not wholly exclude each other.

One must fight to get to the top, especially when one begins at the bottom?

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.

So eager are our people to obliterate the present.

Plain stupidity is the only thing that can give them such assurance.

Logic is doubtless unshakable, but it cannot withstand a man who wants to go on living.

Let me remind you of the old maxim: people under suspicion are better moving than at rest, since at rest they may be sitting in the balance without knowing it, being weighed together with their sins.

It was as if they would rather do the impossible, that is, stop my mouth with food—they did not do it, but they would have liked to do it—than endure my questions.[Also known as:]So long as you have food in your mouth, you have solved all questions for the time being.

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

I have no idea know who the great lawyers are and I don’t believe they can be got at. I know of no single instance in which it could be definitely asserted that they had intervened. They do defend certain cases, but one cannot achieve that oneself. They only defend those whom they wish to defend, and they never take action, I should think, until the case is already beyond the province of the lower Court. In fact, it’s better to put them out of one’s mind altogether, or else one finds interviews with ordinary lawyers so stale and stupid, with their niggling counsels and proposals—I have experienced it myself—that one feels like throwing the whole thing up and taking to bed with one’s face to the wall.