Franz Kafka (July 3rd, 1883 – June 3rd, 1924) was a Jewish Czech writer and novelist born in Prague. He is widely regarded as a major figure of 20th-century literature. His best-known works include the novella The Metamorphosis (1915) and the novels The Trial (1924) and The Castle (1926).

He trained as a lawyer but he felt that his true vocation was writing. Only a minority of his works were published and received little attention during his life. He died relatively unknown in 1924 of tuberculosis, aged 40.

Kafka’s work has influenced many people including film-makers, historians, religious scholars, artists, and philosophers.

Below we include some words of wisdom by Franz Kafka.

“Isolation is a way to know ourselves.”

“As far as I have seen, at school…they aimed at blotting out one’s individuality.”

“There are times when I am convinced I am unfit for any human relationship.”

“No matter how much you keep encouraging someone who is blindfolded to stare through the cloth, he still won’t see a thing.”

“What if I slept a little more and forgot about all this nonsense.”

“Every thing that you love, you will eventually lose, but in the end, love will return in a different form.”

“If you find someone who makes you smile, who checks up on you often to see if you’re okay. Who watches out or you and wants the best for you. Who loves and respects you. Don’t let them go. People like that are hard to find.”

“Start with what is right rather than what is acceptable.”

“It’s only because of their stupidity that they’re able to be so sure of themselves.”

“Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”

“Do not waste your time looking for an obstacle – maybe there is none.”

“You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.”

“People label themselves with all sorts of adjectives. I can only pronounce myself as ‘nauseatingly miserable beyond repair’.”

“Paths are made by walking”

“We live in an age which is so possessed by demons, that soon we shall only be able to do goodness and justice in the deepest secrecy, as if it were a crime.”

“I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.”

“Anybody who preserves the ability to recognize beauty will never get old.”

“You are at once both the quiet and the confusion of my heart.”

“Just because your doctor has a name for your condition, doesn’t mean he knows what it is.”

“I never wish to be easily defined. I’d rather float over other people’s minds as something strictly fluid and non-perceivable; more like a transparent, paradoxically iridescent creature rather than an actual person.”

“He is terribly afraid of dying because he hasn’t yet lived.”

“There are some things one can only achieve by a deliberate leap in the opposite direction.”

“Life is merely terrible; I feel it as few others do. Often — and in my inmost self perhaps all the time — I doubt whether I am a human being.”

“If the literature we are reading does not wake us, why then do we read it? A literary work must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us.”

“Better to have, and not need, than to need, and not have.”

“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 am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones. Basically it is nothing other than this fear we have so often talked about, but fear spread to everything, fear of the greatest as of the smallest, fear, paralyzing fear of pronouncing a word, although this fear may not only be fear but also a longing for something greater than all that is fearful.”

“Nothing is as deceptive as a photograph.”

“We need the books that affect us like a disaster”

“I no longer know If I wish to drown myself in love, vodka or the sea.”

“I wanted to escape the unrest, to shut out the voices around me and within me, so I write.”

“There are only two things. Truth and lies. Truth is indivisible, hence it cannot recognize itself; anyone who wants to recognize it has to be a lie.”

“Being alone has a power over me that never fails. My interior dissolves (for the time being only superficially) and is ready to release what lies deeper. When I am willfully alone, a slight ordering of my interior begins to take place and I need nothing more.”

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