Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self.
It's only because of their stupidity that they're able to be so sure of themselves.
To write prescriptions is easy, but to come to an understanding with people is hard.
What do I have in common with Jews? I don't even have anything in common with myself.
A man of action forced into a state of thought is unhappy until he can get out of it.
Either the world is so tiny or we are enormous; in either case, we fill it completely.
The mediation by the serpent was necessary. Evil can seduce man, but cannot become man.
Everything you say is boring and incomprehensible, but that alone doesn't make it true.
There is a down-and-outness under true knowledge and a childlike happy arising from it.
So long as you have food in your mouth, you have solved all questions for the time being.
What is meant by its nature for the highest and the best, spreads among the lowly people.
Written kisses never arrive at their destination; the ghosts drink them up along the way.
Logic may indeed be unshakeable, but it cannot withstand a man who is determined to live.
Just because your doctor has a name for your condition, doesn't mean he knows what it is.
There are some things one can only achieve by a deliberate leap in the opposite direction.
I wanted to escape the unrest, to shut out the voices around me and within me, so I write.
Man cannot live without a continuous confidence in something indestructible within himself.
If something good has lost its way into you, it will make its escape overnight. I know you.
Sometimes I think I can expiate all my past and future sins through the aching of my bones.
If this is what you came for, then I didn't send for you. Kafka (note to himself in journal)
The thornbush is the old obstacle in the road. It must catch fire if you want to go further.
Every word first looks around in every direction before letting itself be written down by me.
Written kisses don't reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by the ghosts.
Test yourself on mankind. It is something that makes the doubter doubt, the believer believe.
Ours is a lost generation, it may be, but it is more blameless than those earlier generations.
My life was sweeter than other people's and my death will be more terrible by the same degree.
I am more uncertain than I ever was; I feel only the power of life. And I am senselessly empty.
There are questions we could not get past if we were not set free from them by our very nature.
Because of impatience we were driven out [of Paradise]; because of impatience we cannot return.
Art is for the artist is only suffering through which he releases himself for further suffering.
The fact that there is nothing but a spiritual world deprives us of hope and gives us certainty.
But questions that don’t answer themselves at the very moment of their asking are never answered.
I am on the hunt for constructions. I come into a room and find them whitely merging in a corner.
You need not even listen, just wait...the world will offer itself freely to you, unmasking itself.
I do not speak as I think, I do not think as I should, and so it all goes on in helpless darkness.
The ulterior motives with which you absorb and assimilate Evil are not your own but those of Evil.
Every dog has like me the impulse to question, and I have like every dog the impulse not to answer.
I need solitude for my writing; not 'like a hermit' - that wouldn't be enough - but like a dead man.
In me, by myself, without human relationship, there are no visible lies. The limited circle is pure.
I'm thinking only of my illness and my health, though both, the first as well as the second, are you.
May I kiss you then? On this miserable paper? I might as well open the window and kiss the night air.
So then you’re free?’ ‘Yes, I’m free,’ said Karl, and nothing seemed more worthless than his freedom.
If it had been possible to build the Tower of Babel without climbing it, it would have been permitted.
I can't feel a thing; All mournful petal storms are dancing inside the very private spring of my head.
By imposing too great a responsibility, or rather, all responsibility, on yourself, you crush yourself.
The fact that our task is exactly commensurate with our life gives it the appearance of being infinite.
We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.
Every one of us has a bad conscience, which he tries to escape by going to sleep as quickly as possible.
There was once a community of scoundrels, that is to say, they were not scoundrels, but ordinary people.
This morning, for the first time in a long time, the joy again of imagining a knife twisted in my heart.