Franz Kafka

Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one__ own self.

Books are a narcotic.

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

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

If a man has his eyes bound, you can encourage him as much as you like to stare through the bandage, but he'll never see anything.

But I__ not guilty,_ said K. __here__ been a mistake. How is it even possible for someone to be guilty? We__e all human beings here, one like the other._ __hat is true_ said the priest __ut that is how the guilty speak

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.

It is not necessary that you leave the house. Remain at your table and listen. Do not even listen, only wait. Do not even wait, be wholly still and alone. The world will present itself to you for its unmasking, it can do no other, in ecstasy it will writhe at your feet.

Start with what is right rather than what is acceptable.

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

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

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

Suffering is the positive element in this world, indeed it is the only link between this world and the positive.

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.

My 'fear' is my substance, and probably the best part of me.

How pathetically scanty my self-knowledge is compared with, say, my knowledge of my room. There is no such thing as observation of the inner world, as there is of the outer world.

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.

The history of mankind is the instant between two strides taken by a traveler.