Quotes from Blue Octavo Notebooks

“Everyone carries a room about inside him. This fact can even be proved by means of the sense of hearing. If someone walks fast and one pricks up one’s ears and listens, say in the night, when everything round about is quiet, one hears, for instance, the rattling of a mirror not quite firmly fastened to the wall.”
― Franz Kafka, quote from Blue Octavo Notebooks

“Art flies around truth, but with the definite intention of not getting burnt. Its capacity lies in finding in the dark void a place where the beam of light can be intensely caught, without this having been perceptible before.”
― Franz Kafka, quote from Blue Octavo Notebooks

“The man in ecstasy and the man drowning—both throw up their arms.”
― Franz Kafka, quote from Blue Octavo Notebooks

“The main thing, when a sword cuts into one’s soul, is to keep a calm gaze, lose no blood, accept the coldness of the sword with the coldness of a stone. By means of the stab, after the stab, become invulnerable.”
― Franz Kafka, quote from Blue Octavo Notebooks

“Idleness is the beginning of all vice, the crown of all virtues.”
― Franz Kafka, quote from Blue Octavo Notebooks

“How pathetically scanty my self-knowledge is compared with, say, my knowledge of my room.”
― Franz Kafka, quote from Blue Octavo Notebooks

“Seen with the terrestrially sullied eye, we are in a situation of travelers in a train that has met with an accident in a tunnel, and this at a place where the light of the beginning can no longer be seen, and the light of the end is so very small a glimmer that the gaze must continually search for it and is always losing it again, and, furthermore, both the beginning and the end are not even certainties. Round about us, however, in the confusion of our senses, or in the supersensitiveness of our senses, we have nothing but monstrosities and a kaleidoscopic play of things that is either delightful or exhausting according to the mood and injury of each individual. What shall I do? or: Why should I do it? are not questions to be asked in such places.”
― Franz Kafka, quote from Blue Octavo Notebooks

“Evil has ways of surprising one. Suddenly it turns round and says: “You have misunderstood me,” and perhaps it really is so. Evil transforms itself into your own lips, lets itself be gnawed at by your teeth, and with these new lips -- no former ones fitted smoothly to your gums -- to your own amazement you utter the words of goodness.”
― Franz Kafka, quote from Blue Octavo Notebooks

“If you were walking across a plain, had an honest intention of walking on, and yet kept regressing, then it would be a desperate matter; but since you are scrambling up a cliff, about as steep as you yourself are if seen from below, the regression can only be caused by the nature of the ground, and you must not despair.”
― Franz Kafka, quote from Blue Octavo Notebooks

“The observer of the soul cannot penetrate into the soul, but there doubtless is a margin where he comes into contact with it.”
― Franz Kafka, quote from Blue Octavo Notebooks

“Hiding places there are innumerable, escape is only one, but possibilities of escape, again, are as many as hiding places.”
― Franz Kafka, quote from Blue Octavo Notebooks

“It is only our conception of time that makes us call the Last Judgment by this name. It is, in fact, a kind of martial law.”
― Franz Kafka, quote from Blue Octavo Notebooks

“It is comforting to reflect that the disproportion of things in the world seems to be only arithmetical.”
― Franz Kafka, quote from Blue Octavo Notebooks

“At least descriptive psychology is probably, taken as a whole, a form of anthropomorphism, a nibbling at our own limits.”
― Franz Kafka, quote from Blue Octavo Notebooks

“In the struggle between yourself and the world
second the world.”
― Franz Kafka, quote from Blue Octavo Notebooks

About the author

Popular quotes

“PROMETHEUS: 'Oh, it is easy for the one who stands outside the prison-wall of pain to exhort and teach the one who suffers”
― Aeschylus, quote from Prometheus Bound

“the worst thing that could happen to a colored child in the South was for a parent to hear that a child was acting up. There would be no appeals, the punishment swift and physical. The arbitrary nature of grown people’s wrath gave colored children practice for life in the caste system, which is why parents, forced to train their children in the ways of subservience, treated their children as the white people running things treated them. It was preparation for the lower-caste role children were expected to have mastered by puberty.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, quote from The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration

“تضربين معصمي أماما وخلفا .. بالطريقة التي تمارسينها عندما تعجزين عن النوم ، وبرغم هذا لا تريدين لي أن أنام أنا الآخر .”
― Craig Clevenger, quote from Dermaphoria

“On the first day of Human Sexuality, Ruth Ramsey wore a short lime green skirt, a clingy black top, and strappy high-heeled sandals, the kind of attention-getting outfit she normally wouldn't have worn on a date---not that she was going on a lot of dates these days---let alone to work. ”
― Tom Perrotta, quote from The Abstinence Teacher

“The way that Nico looks at me makes me high. It’s like a drug I crave desperately to have again. His pleasure is my reward, and I’m willing to do whatever it takes to earn it.”
― Vi Keeland, quote from Worth the Fight

Interesting books

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.