Franz Kafka Quotes

Everything that falls upon the eye is apparition, a sheet dropped over the world's true workings. The nerves and the brain are tricked, and one is left with dreams that these specters loose their hands from ours and walk away, the curve of the back and the swing of the coat so familiar as to imply that they should be permanent fixtures of the world, when in fact nothing is more perishable.

When we look at the flowers, we suddenly forget so many important things. We forget that all flowers die. We forget that winter will come again. We forget that nothing really endures and that, like the flowers that die at the end of the growing season, we'll join them in the cold ground.

Time is a circus, always packing up and moving away.

Robert, you are just a transient. I have seen them come and I have seen them go and I’ll be here long after you have gone.

The Flower that once has blown forever dies.

We're all just passing time and occupy our chair very briefly.

I shoot just one moment at a time... These moments are beneath the threshold of perception.

I' is merely one of the world's instantaneous spasms.

Even the most solid of things, and the most real, the best-loved and the well-known, are only hand shadows on the wall. Empty space and points of light.

She seemed fragile like a moonflower – destined to bloom for a single lovely night, and then to fade and fall.

I'm always interested in the unexpected and know that things, especially in show business, but in life generally, are inevitably fleeting to one extent.

Life is only a flicker of melted ice.

A man, when he burns, leaves only a handful of ashes. No woman can hold him. The wind must blow him away.

Days are coloured bubbles that float upon the surface of fathomless nights.

Not to hope for things to last forever, is what the year teaches and even the hour which snatches a nice day away.

It's not realistic to imagine that any poem will last forever. Our species won't last forever! We try to capture and preserve our impressions of reality because it's all going away: everything we think and remember, everything we've ever felt, everyone we love.

I would have stayed forever within the garden of Re-mose's childhood, but time is a mother's enemy.

And here you are hurried, And here you are gone; And here is the love, That it's all built upon.

Nothing is so fickle and uncertain as popularity. It is here today and gone tomorrow. It is a sandy foundation, and sure to fail those who build upon it.

We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever.

In the end, all solutions are temporary.

Her life-that was the only chance she had-the short season between two silences.

A society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven.

Acting is like painting pictures on bathroom tissues. Ten minutes later you throw them away and they are gone.

I came like Water, and like Wind I go.