Franz Kafka Quotes

It's difficult to put into words what freedom feels like. You only know what freedom feels like if you know what it feels like to not be free.

I don't want to live like a prisoner.

The fundamental sense of freedom is freedom from chains, from imprisonment, from enslavement by others. The rest is extension of this sense, or else metaphor.

No one is free, even the birds are chained to the sky.

Attempts to tame the wayward and domesticate the riotous, to make the unknowable predictable and enchain the free-roaming - all such things sound the death knell to love.

Hee is not free that drawes his chaine.

Of what use were wings to a man fast bound in chains of iron?

Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, by whatever name it may be called and whether it professes to be enforcing the will of God or the injunctions of men.

See, it's no in between: you're either free or you're a slave.

Fear, conformity, immorality: these are heavy burdens. They drain us of creative energy. And when we are drained of creative energy, we do not create. We procreate, but we do not create.

Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.

It's sort of what the Johnny and Devi stories are about, the idea of always being a slave to something.

When I don't feel free and can't do what I want I just react. I go against it.

I do not like Moscow life. You live here not as you want to live, but as old women want you to.

Man is everywhere still in chains.

Man is born free, yet he is everywhere in chains.

You'll never know how sweet freedom can be unless you've lost it for eight and a half years.

Whatever crushes individuality is despotism.

If you're going to hold someone down you're going to have to hold onto the other end of the chain. You are confined by your own system of repression.

Familiarize yourselves with the chains of bondage and you prepare your own limbs to wear them.

… obedience, Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth, Makes slaves of men, and of the human frame A mechanized automaton.

Nothing costs more than the loss of freedom.

I'm like a caged animal sometimes. Let me yearn to breathe free.

What we know to be true is that comfort isn't always freedom. People confuse the two.

All people are enslaved by something.