Franz Kafka Quotes

When men think and believe in one set of symbols and act in ways which are contrary to their professed and conscious ideas, confusion and insincerity are bound to result.

There is not a single line in this diary that does not call for a correction or a denial...Yes: throughout these pages I meant what I was writing and I meant the opposite; reading them again I feel completely lost...I was lying to myself. How I lied to myself!

I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.

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

Ah, lips that say one thing, while the heart thinks another.

I believe what I said yesterday. I don't know what I said, but I know what I think and I assume it's what I said.

I think our danger is that we talk one thing, and we feel and act another thing.

There are many who have grave scruples about deceiving but think it as nothing to deceive themselves.

It is easy for men to talk one thing and think another.

The great majority of us are required to live a constant, systematic duplicity. Your health is bound to be affected by it if, day after day, you say the opposite of what you feel, you grovel before what you dislike and rejoice at what bring brings you nothing but misfortune. Our nervous system isn’t just a fiction, it’s part of our physical body, and our soul exists in space and is inside us, like teeth in our mouth. It can’t be forever violated with impunity.

Yes. The way people behave, the paradoxes, the contradictions. All these things we have to live with and still pretend that everything is only black or white. That, I think, is the most interesting thing in human nature. The fact that we have to do one thing and pretend something else. That’s when it becomes very interesting. If you can literally speak the way you feel, then it’s not interesting anymore. It’s when you have to lie that it becomes interesting.

Life's so much easier when you're not always maintaining two worlds: the one formed of lies, which feels real, and the one you live in, which often feels like lies. So easy to get them confused.

It's just not easy to explain to someone else what you don't understand yourself.

No habit or quality is more easily acquired than hypocrisy, nor any thing sooner learned than to deny the sentiments of our hearts and the principle we act from: but the seeds of every passion are innate to us, and nobody comes into the world without them.

In real life, people are constantly saying one thing and doing another, but if you write your characters that way, the story becomes too hard to follow.

We are only falsehood, duplicity, contradiction; we both conceal and disguise ourselves from ourselves.

... gross, barefaced inconsistency.

The politician is an acrobat. He keeps his balance by saying the opposite of what he does.

They say, and do not.

Hypocrisy is not the failure to practice what you preach but the failure to believe it. Hypocrisy is propaganda.

The fanatical believer is not conscious of his envy, malice, pettiness and dishonesty. There is a wall of words between his consciousness and his real self.

I think I wear my hypocrisy on my sleeve. I would never say I'm not a complete hypocrite.

In India, we say one thing, and we do something else.

I understand and I don't understand human beings.

To be honest I don't really know because I really didn't care when I was writing about mixing up reality with what was not reality.