“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.”
― Franz Kafka, quote from Diaries of Franz Kafka
“April 27. Incapable of living with people, of speaking. Complete immersion in myself, thinking of myself. Apathetic, witless, fearful. I have nothing to say to anyone - never.”
― Franz Kafka, quote from Diaries of Franz Kafka
“People label themselves with all sorts of adjectives. I can only pronounce myself as 'nauseatingly miserable beyond repair'.”
― Franz Kafka, quote from Diaries of Franz Kafka
“Life's splendor forever lies in wait about each one of us in all its fullness, but veiled from view, deep down, invisible, far off. It is there, though, not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If you summon it by the right word, by its right name, it will come.”
― Franz Kafka, quote from Diaries of Franz Kafka
“Nervous states of the worst sort control me without pause. Everything that is not literature bores me and I hate it. I lack all aptitude for family life except, at best, as an observer. I have no family feeling and visitors make me almost feel as though I were maliciously being attacked.”
― Franz Kafka, quote from Diaries of Franz Kafka
“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.”
― Franz Kafka, quote from Diaries of Franz Kafka
“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.”
― Franz Kafka, quote from Diaries of Franz Kafka
“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.”
― Franz Kafka, quote from Diaries of Franz Kafka
“Forget everything. Open the windows. Clear the room. The wind blows through it. You see only its emptiness, you search in every corner and don’t find yourself.”
― Franz Kafka, quote from Diaries of Franz Kafka
“2 November. This morning, for the first time in a long time, the joy again of imagining a knife twisted in my heart.”
― Franz Kafka, quote from Diaries of Franz Kafka
“It would be very unjust to say that you deserted me, but that I was deserted, and sometimes terribly so, is true.”
― Franz Kafka, quote from Diaries of Franz Kafka
“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?”
― Franz Kafka, quote from Diaries of Franz Kafka
“My doubts stand in a circle around every word, I see them before I see the word, but what then! I do not see the word at all, I invent it.”
― Franz Kafka, quote from Diaries of Franz Kafka
“I feel an unhappiness which almost dismembers me, and at the same time am convinced of its necessity”
― Franz Kafka, quote from Diaries of Franz Kafka
“the poisonous world flows into my mouth like water into that of a drowning man”
― Franz Kafka, quote from Diaries of Franz Kafka
“There sat I, a faded being, under faded leaves.”
― Franz Kafka, quote from Diaries of Franz Kafka
“My job is unbearable to me because it conflicts with my only desire and my only calling, which is literature. Since I am nothing but literature and can and want to be nothing else, my job will never take possession of me, it may, however, shatter me completely, and this is by no means a remote possibility.”
― Franz Kafka, quote from Diaries of Franz Kafka
“Don't you want to join us?" I was recently asked by an acquaintance when he ran across me alone after midnight in a coffeehouse that was already almost deserted. "No, I don't," I said.”
― Franz Kafka, quote from Diaries of Franz Kafka
“There can be no more beautiful spot to die in, no spot more worthy of total despair, than one’s own novel.”
― Franz Kafka, quote from Diaries of Franz Kafka
“Lost among these entirely strange people.”
― Franz Kafka, quote from Diaries of Franz Kafka
“Don't despair, not even over the fact that you don't despair. Just when everything seems over with, new forces come marching up, and precisely that means that you are alive. And if they don't, then everything is over with here, once and for all.”
― Franz Kafka, quote from Diaries of Franz Kafka
“But I will write in spite of everything, absolutely; it is my struggle for self-preservation.”
― Franz Kafka, quote from Diaries of Franz Kafka
“If something good has lost its way into you, it will make its escape overnight. I know you.”
― Franz Kafka, quote from Diaries of Franz Kafka
“I ought to be able to invent words capable of blowing the odor of corpses in a direction other than straight into mine and the reader's face.”
― Franz Kafka, quote from Diaries of Franz Kafka
“Always only the desire to die and the not-yet-yielding; this alone is love.”
― Franz Kafka, quote from Diaries of Franz Kafka
“Down Here and up there are all the same to me. Whether I lie here in the gutter and stow away the rain water or drink champagne up there with the same lips makes no difference to me, not even in the taste.”
― Franz Kafka, quote from Diaries of Franz Kafka
“It is as if I were made of stone, as if I were my own tombstone, there is no loophole for doubt or for faith, for love or repugnance, for courage or anxiety, in particular or in general, only a vague hope lives on, but no better than the inscriptions on tombstones.”
― Franz Kafka, quote from Diaries of Franz Kafka
“There am I. I cannot leave. I have nothing to complain about. I do not suffer excessively, for I do not suffer consistently, it does not pile up, at least I do not feel it for the time being, and the degree of my suffering is far less than the suffering that is perhaps my due.”
― Franz Kafka, quote from Diaries of Franz Kafka
“I didn’t want any new clothes at all; because if I had to look ugly anyway, I wanted to at least be comfortable. I let the awful clothes affect even my posture, walked around with my back bowed, my shoulders drooping, my hands and arms all over the place. I was afraid of mirrors, because they showed an inescapable ugliness.”
― Franz Kafka, quote from Diaries of Franz Kafka
“This afternoon the pain occasioned by my loneliness came upon me so piercingly and intensely that I became aware that the strength which I gain through this writing thus spends itself, a strength which I certainly have not intended for this purpose.”
― Franz Kafka, quote from Diaries of Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka
Born place: in Prague, Austria-Hungary
Born date July 3, 1883
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“Anna is something wrong " he asked his brow furrowed.
Yes I want to say. You ran a prison camp for Jews. You keep my parents locked in the ghetto. You let your wife's father be killed and would kill Jacob too if given the chance. Your wretched Gestapo came to our house and now Lukasz might have to leave us. Let me count the ways. Of course I did not dare to say any of this. "No Herr Kommandant " I replied managing to keep my voice even. "Everything is fine.”
― Pam Jenoff, quote from The Kommandant's Girl
“[Materialism] seeks the primary and most simple state of matter, and then tries to develop all the others from it; ascending from mere mechanism, to chemism, to polarity, to the vegetable and to the animal kingdom. And if we suppose this to have been done, the last link in the chain would be animal sensibility - that is knowledge - which would consequently now appear as a mere modification or state of matter produced by causality. Now if we had followed materialism thus far with clear ideas, when we reached its highest point we would suddenly be seized with a fit of the inextinguishable laughter of the Olympians. As if waking from a dream, we would all at once become aware that its final result - knowledge, which it reached so laboriously, was presupposed as the indispensable condition of its very starting-point, mere matter; and when we imagined that we thought matter, we really thought only the subject that perceives matter; the eye that sees it, the hand that feels it, the understanding that knows it. Thus the tremendous petitio principii reveals itself unexpectedly.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, quote from The World as Will and Representation, Vol 1
“The question is not whether or not our children sin later in life. The question is, do we have a biblical obligation to train them before they leave home?”
― Voddie T. Baucham Jr., quote from Family Driven Faith: Doing What It Takes to Raise Sons and Daughters Who Walk with God
“Maybe Larry was wrong about the word friend, maybe he'd been shoved away from everybody for so long all he was was a sponge for the wrongs other people did. Maybe, after all this time, he'd started to believe their version of him.”
― Tom Franklin, quote from Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter
“Tell me what it will take, Jay?" His voice whispers in my ear. "I want you." ~ Rhye”
― Nicole Reed, quote from Ruining Me
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A Well-Tempered Hear...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.
