Did he really want this warm room of his, so comfortably fitted with old family furniture, to be transformed into a cave, in which, no doubt, he would be free to crawl about unimpeded in all directions, but only at the price of rapidly and completely forgetting his human past at the same time?

— Franz Kafka

Don Quixote's misfortune is not his imagination, but Sancho Panza.

— Franz Kafka

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.

— Franz Kafka

Don't be too hasty, don't take somebody else's opinion without testing it.

— Franz Kafka

During last night’s insomnia, as these thoughts came and went between my aching temples, I realized once again, what I had almost forgotten in this recent period of relative calm, that I tread a terribly tenuous, indeed almost non-existent soil spread over a pit full of shadows, whence the powers of darkness emerge at will to destroy my life…

— Franz Kafka

Each of us has his own way of emerging from the underworld, mine is by writing. That's why the only way I can keep going, if at all, is by writing, not through rest and sleep. I am far more likely to achieve peace of mind through writing than the capacity to write through peace.

— Franz Kafka

Even if no salvation should come, I want to be worthy of it at every moment.

— Franz Kafka

Even the merest gesture is holy if it is filled with faith.

— Franz Kafka

Every new discovery is assumed at once into the sum total of knowledge, and with that ceases in a sense to be a discovery; it dissolves into the whole and disappears, and one must have a trained scientific eye even to recognize it after that.

— Franz Kafka

Every word first looks around in every direction before letting itself be written down by me.

— Franz Kafka