Franz Kafka Quotes

The value of life can be measured by how many times your soul has been deeply stirred.

I have written only what I have thought through, felt through and suffered through.

Whenever you're writing something that's reflective, you have to put yourself through some sort of ordeal just to understand the way you're feeling.

Give me life, give me pain, give me myself again.

I've cried my eyes out and wanted to end it all before. I hope everybody's gone that far, because it makes life rich.

And I started to cry again, realizing that it must be changing him, too, this man who was kind enough to be a soul but strong as only a human could be.

I am ashamed every day, and more ashamed the next. But I will spend the rest of my life in this living space writing these notes, this journal, recording my acts and reflections, finding some honor, some worth at the bottom of things. I want ten thousand pages that will stop the world.

What can I expect from myself? My sensation in all their horrible acuity, and a profound awareness of feeling. A sharp mind that only destroys me, and an unusual capacity for dreaming to keep me entertained. A dead will and a reflection that cradles it, like a living child. From, The Book of Disquiet

We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.

How sickness enlarges the dimension of a man’s self to himself!

My abyss speaks, I have turned my ultimate depth inside out into the light.

All the books of the world full of thoughts and poems are nothing in comparison to a minute of sobbing, when feeling surges in waves, the soul feels itself profoundly and finds itself. Tears are the melting ice of snow. All angels are close to the crying person.

During really difficult times in my life when I start questioning why I am struggling with something, I often turn to books to understand myself better.

If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read? So that it shall make us happy? Good God, we should also be happy if we had no books, and such books as make us happy we could, if need be, write ourselves. But what we must have are those books which come upon us like ill fortune, and distress us deeply, like the death of one we love better than ourselves; like suicide. A book must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us.

I feel strong. Not strong enough to face myself, but strong enough to keep going.

I have a good friend who says, "We're all just dodging bullets." It seems to me the trick to living a good life is to try to move away from the gun you turn on yourself.

Of course, every time I end a book, I look down at myself and I'm just the same. I'm always disappointed that I'm just the same, but not enough to never do it again!

If I cried me a river of all my confessions, would I drown in my shallow regret?

A manifesto, a diary, a crumpled suicide note, and a still relevant love letter.

Voyages are accomplished inwardly.

The aim of literature ... is the creation of a strange object covered with fur which breaks your heart.

A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul.

A book should be an axe to chop open the frozen sea inside us.

The men and women who are truly filled with light are those who have gazed deeply into the darkness of their own imperfect existence.

I am moved by fancies that are curled, around these images and cling, the notion of some infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing.