100 Franz Kafka Quotes on Love, Life & ‘The Metamorphosis’

In this post, we’ll read Franz Kafka quotes who was a German-speaking Bohemian writer.

Franz Kafka (1883-1924) was born into a middle-class Jewish family and his father was a successful but domineering businessman. His relationship with his father greatly influenced his life and work.

He worked at the Workers Accident Insurance Institute at the which contributed to his feelings of alienation and entrapment, themes often reflected in his writing.

Franz Kafka is known for his complex and surreal literary works that often explore themes of alienation, existential dread, and the absurdity of bureaucracy and his works are characterized by their surreal, nightmarish quality and often feature protagonists who face bizarre and oppressive situations.

His popular works include “The Metamorphosis”, “The Trial”, and “The Castle”.

Let’s read the most popular Franz Kafka quotes on love, life, death and more.

Table of Contents

Best Franz Kafka Quotes

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

2. “First impressions are always unreliable.”

3. “Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.”

4. “So eager are our people to obliterate the present.”

5. “Association with human beings lures one into self-observation.”

6. “There are two cardinal sins from which all others spring: impatience and laziness.”

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

8. “Most men are not wicked… They are sleep-walkers, not evil evildoers.”

9. “All language is but a poor translation.”

10. “Productivity is being able to do things that you were never able to do before.”

11. “Evil is whatever distracts.”

12. “One must not cheat anyone, not even the world of its victory.”

13. “My guiding principle is this: Guilt is never to be doubted.”

14. “Youth is happy because it has the ability to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.”

15. “Sleep is the most innocent creature there is and a sleepless man, the most guilty.”

16. “By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.”

17. “The mediation by the serpent was necessary. Evil can seduce man, but cannot become man.”

18. “I am free and that is why I am lost.”

Franz Kafka Quotes on Love

1. “Love is, that you are the knife which I plunge into myself.”

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

3. “Every thing you love is very likely to be lost, but in the end, love will return in a different way.”

4. “Should I be grateful or should I curse the fact that despite all misfortune I can still feel love, an unearthly love but still for earthly objects.”

5. “I can love only what I can place so high above me that I cannot reach it.”

6.“Sensual love deceives one as to the nature of heavenly love; it could not do so alone, but since it unconsciously has the element of heavenly love within it, it can do so.”

7. “Love is a drama of contradictions.”

8. “You are the knife I turn inside myself; that is love. That, my dear, is love.”

9. “I can’t think of any greater happiness than to be with you all the time, without interruption, endlessly, even though I feel that here in this world there’s no undisturbed place for our love, neither in the village nor anywhere else; and I dream of a grave, deep and narrow, where we could clasp each other in our arms as with clamps, and I would hide my face in you and you would hide your face in me, and nobody would ever see us any more.”

10. “In argument similes are like songs in love; they describe much, but prove nothing.”

Franz Kafka Quotes on Life

1. “Only the moment counts. It determines life.”

2. “I was ashamed of myself when I realised life was a costume party and I attended with my real face.”

3. “I am not well; I could have built the Pyramids with the effort it takes me to cling on to life and reason.”

4. “The meaning of life is that it stops.”

5. “We are sinful not only because we have eaten of the Tree of Knowledge, but also because we have not yet eaten of the Tree of Life. The state in which we are is sinful, irrespective of guilt.”

6. “Woman, or more precisely put, perhaps, marriage, is the representative of life with which you are meant to come to terms.”

7. “Anyone who cannot come to terms with his life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate… but with his other hand he can note down what he sees among the ruins.”

8. “I have spent all my life resisting the desire to end it.”

9. “Slept, awoke, slept, awoke, miserable life.”

Franz Kafka Quotes on ‘The Metamorphosis’

1. “He was a tool of the boss, without brains or backbone.”

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

3. “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.”

4. “How about if I sleep a little bit longer and forget all this nonsense”.

5. “Calm —indeed the calmest— reflection might be better than the most confused decisions”

6. “I only fear danger where I want to fear it.”

7. “If I didn’t have my parents to think about I’d have given in my notice a long time ago, I’d have gone up to the boss and told him just what I think, tell him everything I would, let him know just what I feel. He’d fall right off his desk! And it’s a funny sort of business to be sitting up there at your desk, talking down at your subordinates from up there, especially when you have to go right up close because the boss is hard of hearing.”

8. “His growing lack of concern for the others hardly surprised him, whereas previously he had prided himself on being considerate.”

9. “The door could not be heard slamming; they had probably left it open, as is the custom in homes where a great misfortune has occurred.”

Romantic Franz Kafka Quotes

1. “I miss you deeply, unfathomably, senselessly, terribly.”

2. “I long for you; I who usually longs without longing, as though I am unconscious and absorbed in neutrality and apathy, really, utterly long for every bit of you.”

3. “I want in fact more of you. In my mind I am dressing you with light; I am wrapping you up in blankets of complete acceptance and then I give myself to you. I long for you; I who usually long without longing, as though I am unconscious and absorbed in neutrality and apathy, really, utterly long for every bit of you.”

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

5. “I’m tired, can’t think of anything and want only to lay my face in your lap, feel your hand on my head and remain like that through all eternity.”

6. “May I kiss you then? On this miserable paper? I might as well open the window and kiss the night air.”

7. “I dream of a grave, deep and narrow, where we could clasp each other in our arms as with clamps, and I would hide my face in you and you would hide your face in me, and nobody would ever see us any more.”

8. “Do you know, darling? When you became involved with others you quite possibly stepped down a level or two, but If you become involved with me, you will be throwing yourself into the abyss.”

Sad Franz Kafka Quotes

1. “I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy.”

2. “It is often safer to be in chains than to be free.”

3. “If I shall exist eternally, how shall I exist tomorrow?”

4. “I am a cage, in search of a bird.”

5. “There is an infinite amount of hope in the universe … but not for us.”

6. “I usually solve problems by letting them devour me.”

7. “I am in chains. Don’t touch my chains.”

8. “I’m doing badly, I’m doing well, whichever you prefer.”

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

10. “If you become involved with me, you will be throwing yourself into the abyss.”

11. “Isolation is a way to know ourselves.”

12. “What am I doing here in this endless winter?”

13. “Please — consider me a dream.”

14. “God gives the nuts, but he does not crack them.”

15. “My condition is not unhappiness, but it is also not happiness, not indifference, not weakness, not fatigue, not another interest – so what is it then?”

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

17. “What do I have in common with Jews? I don’t even have anything in common with myself.”

Franz Kafka Quotes on Self

1. “I lack nothing. I only needed myself.”

2. “For myself I am too heavy, and for you too light.”

3. “By imposing too great a responsibility, or rather, all responsibility, on yourself, you crush yourself.”

4. “I do not see the world at all; I invent it.”

5. “Go on caring for me.”

6. “You wouldn’t believe the kind of person I could become if you wanted it.”

7. “He who seeks does not find, but he who does not seek will be found.”

8. “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.”

9. “I don’t feel particularly proud of myself. But when I walk alone in the woods or lie in the meadows, all is well.”

10. “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.”

11. “In theory there is a possibility of perfect happiness: To believe in the indestructible element within one, and not to strive towards it.”

Franz Kafka Quotes on Death

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

2. “This tremendous world I have inside of me. How to free myself, and this world, without tearing myself to pieces. And rather tear myself to a thousand pieces than be buried with this world within me.”

3. “It would have been so pointless to kill himself that, even if he had wanted to, the pointlessness would have made him unable.”

4. “Logic may indeed be unshakeable, but it cannot withstand a man who is determined to live.”

5. “If I could drown in sleep as I drown in fear I would be no longer alive.”

6. “Kill me, or you are a murderer.”

7. “A first sign of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.”

8. “But what if all the tranquility, all the comfort, all the contentment were now to come to a horrifying end?”

Franz Kafka Quotes on Writing & Books

1. “Writing is prayer.”

2. “The person I am in the company of my sisters has been entirely different from the person I am in the company of other people. Fearless, powerful, surprising, moved as I otherwise am only when I write.”

3. “I need solitude for my writing; not ‘like a hermit’ – that wouldn’t be enough – but like a dead man.”

4. “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.”

5. “Written kisses don’t reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by the ghosts.”

6. “A lawyer is a person who writes a 10,000-word document and calls it a “brief.”

7. “Books are a narcotic.”

8. “Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self.”

9. “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”

10. “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.”

Franz Kafka Quotes on Time

1. “So long as you have food in your mouth, you have solved all questions for the time being.”

2. “Yours (now I’m even losing my name – it was getting shorter and shorter all the time and is now: Yours)”

3. “In a way, you are poetry material; You are full of cloudy subtleties I am willing to spend a lifetime figuring out. Words burst in your essence and you carry their dust in the pores of your ethereal individuality.”

4. “Perhaps we don’t love unreasonably because we think we have time, or have to reckon with time. But what if we don’t have time? Or what if time, as we know it, is irrelevant? Ah, if only the world were ending tomorrow. We could help each other very much.”

These Franz Kafka quotes explores his writings about alienation, existential anxiety, and the oppressive nature of modern society and bureaucratic institutions.

Kafka had a troubled personal life and also struggled with health issues, including tuberculosis, which ultimately led to his early death at the age of 40. He also had several intense but complicated relationships with women, and his engagement to Felice Bauer was twice broken off.

Franz Kafka published only a small portion of his work during his lifetime and he told his close friend and literary executor to destroy his manuscripts after his death but he published them instead which helped secure his fame after his death.

The term “Kafkaesque” has entered the lexicon to describe situations similar to his writing which is marked by surreal, oppressive, or nightmarishly complex qualities.

Which of these Franz Kafka quotes left an impact on you?

Also Read: