Franz Kafka Quotes

In a sense I am able to interrogate myself, address myself from that slight distance and enter a kind of dialogical relationship with myself. Because I'm saying, "Look, these are things that have happened to me, but how odd they are or how ordinary they are [is up to the reader to decide]."

But you can't get away from yourself. You can't decide not to see yourself anymore. You can't decide to turn off the noise in your head.

Thinking: the talking of the soul with itself.

I'm not one of those people who writes long soliloquies.

I'm an introspective dude.

Facts make you face stuff about yourself you'd rather not see.

That inner narrative - the desire to understand the way I am - never really switches off.

I know the things I say go out of my own mouth and into my own ears.

When all is said, a man's final judgment of his fellows must be based upon his knowledge of himself

If one cannot get along without a mirror, even in shaving oneself, how can one reconstruct oneself or one's life, without seeing oneself in the "mirror" of literature?

We are reduced to asking others what we are. We never dare to ask ourselves.

Self knowledge is always bad news.

It is curious how an age of public self-revelation, and of the use of psychological jargon, should also be an age when self-examination is rarely practised.

I was constantly watching myself, my secret self, as dependent on my actions as my own personality

I can see myself before myself - a being through dark scenery.

When the defects of others are perceived with so much clarity, it is because one possesses them oneself.

We should live as if we were in public view, and think, too, as if someone could peer into the inmost recesses of our hearts-which someone can!

There are times when those eyes inside your brain stare back at you.

we are such inward secret creatures, that inwardness the most amazing thing about us, even more amazing than our reason. but we cannot just walk into the cavern and look around. most of what we think we know about our minds is pseudo-knowledge. we are all such shocking poseurs, so good at inflating the importance of what we think we value.

This inescapable duty to observe oneself: if someone else is observing me, naturally I have to observe myself too; if none observe me, I have to observe myself all the closer.

Some people think humility is thinking lowly of yourself. Some people think it's not thinking about yourself. But, to me, the best definition of humility is radical self-awareness from a distance, seeing themselves from a distance and saying, what's my problem?

Man shouldn’t be able to see his own face – there’s nothing more sinister. Nature gave him the gift of not being able to see it, and of not being able to stare into his own eyes. Only in the water of rivers and ponds could he look at his face. And the very posture he had to assume was symbolic. He had to bend over, stoop down, to commit the ignominy of beholding himself. The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart.

A man may call to mind the face of his friend, but not his own. Here, then, is an initial difficulty in the way of applying the maxim, Know Thyself.

A man is ever apt to contemplate himself out of all proportion to his surroundings.

I looked at myself in that window, oblivious to all the people around me and I stared and smiled that particular smile. You know that smile that seems to knock you and tell you how pathetic you are? That's the smile I was smiling.