Franz Kafka

“The observer of the soul cannot penetrate into the soul, but there doubtless is a margin where he comes into contact with it.”

“My job is unbearable to me because it conflicts with my only desire and my only calling, which is literature. Since I am nothing but literature and can and want to be nothing else, my job will never take possession of me, it may, however, shatter me completely, and this is by no means a remote possibility.”

“Not everyone can see the truth, but he can be it.”

“I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy.”

“This tremendous world I have inside of me. How to free myself, and this world, without tearing myself to pieces. And rather tear myself to a thousand pieces than be buried with this world within me.”

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

“He is terribly afraid of dying because he hasn’t yet lived.”

“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.”

“[He] used to be so insignificant that one literally felt alone in his presence.”

“Even if no salvation should come, I want to be worthy of it at every moment.”

“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.”

“The indestructible is one: it is each individual human being and, at the same time, it is common to all, hence the incomparably indivisible union that exists between human beings.”

“You're not cross with me, though?" he said. She pulled her hand away and answered, "No, no, I'm never cross with anyone.”

“It puzzled K., at least it puzzled him looking at it from the policemen's point of view, that they had made him go into the room and left him alone there, where he had ten different ways of killing himself. At the same time, though, he asked himself, this time looking at it from his own point of view, what reason he could have to do so. Because those two were sitting there in the next room and had taken his breakfast, perhaps?”

“A stair not worn hollow by footsteps is, regarded from its own point of view, only a boring something made of wood.”

“One of the first signs of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.”

“Love is a drama of contradictions.”

“The relationship to one's fellow man is the relationship of prayer, the relationship to oneself is the relationship of striving; it is from prayer that one draws the strength for one's striving.”

“Atlas was permitted the opinion that he was at liberty, if he wished, to drop the Earth and creep away; but this opinion was all that he was permitted.”

“The fact that our task is exactly commensurate with our life gives it the appearance of being infinite.”