Franz Kafka Quotes - Page 2

Nothing is as deceptive as a photograph.

You are at once both the quiet and the confusion of my heart.

If you become involved with me, you will be throwing yourself into the abyss.

I do not see the world at all; I invent it.

I miss you deeply, unfathomably, senselessly, terribly.

I want in fact more of you. In my mind I am dressing you with light; I am wrapping you up in blankets of complete acceptance and then I give myself to you. I long for you; I who usually long without longing, as though I am unconscious and absorbed in neutrality and apathy, really, utterly long for every bit of you.

In a way, you are poetry material; You are full of cloudy subtleties I am willing to spend a lifetime figuring out. Words burst in your essence and you carry their dust in the pores of your ethereal individuality.

If the literature we are reading does not wake us, why then do we read it? A literary work must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us.

I have no memory for things I have learned, nor things I have read, nor things experienced or heard, neither for people nor events; I feel that I have experienced nothing, learned nothing, that I actually know less than the average schoolboy, and that what I do know is superficial, and that every second question is beyond me. I am incapable of thinking deliberately; my thoughts run into a wall. I can grasp the essence of things in isolation, but I am quite incapable of coherent, unbroken thinking. I can't even tell a story properly; in fact, I can scarcely talk.

I can love only what I can place so high above me that I cannot reach it.

Follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.

You can choose to be free , but it's last decision you'll ever make

I have spent my life resisting the desire to end it.

I’m tired, can’t think of anything and want only to lay my face in your lap, feel your hand on my head and remain like that through all eternity.

Anything that has real and lasting value is always a gift from within.

All language is but a poor translation.

I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.

I never wish to be easily defined.

Better to have, and not need, than to need, and not have.

Life is merely terrible; I feel it as few others do. Often — and in my inmost self perhaps all the time — I doubt whether I am a human being.

Please — consider me a dream.

They say ignorance is bliss.... they're wrong

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.

Being alone has a power over me that never fails. My interior dissolves (for the time being only superficially) and is ready to release what lies deeper. When I am willfully alone, a slight ordering of my interior begins to take place and I need nothing more.

What am I doing here in this endless winter?