Quote

The Kafka paradox: art depends on truth, but truth, being indivisable, cannot know itself: to tell the truth is to lie. thus the writer is the truth, and yet when he speakes he lies.

Franz Kafka

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Franz Kafka
Age: 41 †
Born: 1883
Born: July 3
Died: 1924
Died: July 3
Aphorist
Claims Adjuster
Diarist
Fabulist
Lawyer
Novelist
Poet Lawyer
Prosaist
Screenwriter
Short Story Writer
Translator
Writer
Praha
František Kafka
Kafka
Depends
Writer
Lying
Tell
Art
Kafka
Cannot
Paradox
Truth
Thus
Lies

More quotes by Franz Kafka

Image
In argument similes are like songs in love they describe much, but prove nothing.
Franz Kafka
Image
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
Image
I’m tired, can’t think of anything and want only to lay my face in your lap, feel your hand on my head and remain like that through all eternity.
Franz Kafka
Image
Writer speaks a stench.
Franz Kafka
Image
I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us.
Franz Kafka
Image
There they lay, but not in the forgetfulness of the previous night. She was seeking and he was seeking, they raged and contorted their faces and bored their heads into each others bosom in the urgency of seeking something, and their embraces and their tossing limbs did not avail to make them forget, but only reminded them of what they sought
Franz Kafka
Image
Anything that has real and lasting value is always a gift from within.
Franz Kafka
Image
We need the books that affect us like a disaster
Franz Kafka
Image
The old incapacity. Interrupted my writing for barely ten days and already cast out. Once again prodigious efforts stand before me. You have to dive down, as it were, and sink more rapidly than that which sinks in advance of you.
Franz Kafka
Image
We were created in order to live in Paradise, and Paradise was ordained to serve us. What was ordained for us has been changed it is not said that this has also happened with what was ordained for Paradise.
Franz Kafka
Image
A belief is like a guillotine, just as heavy, just as light.
Franz Kafka
Image
There can be knowledge of the diabolical, but no belief in it, for more of the diabolical than there is does not exist.
Franz Kafka
Image
One has just been sent out as a biblical dove, has found nothing green, and slips back into the darkness of the Ark
Franz Kafka
Image
The meaning of life is that it stops.
Franz Kafka
Image
I answer one of your letters, then lie in bed in apparent calm, but my heart beats through my entire body and is conscious only of you. I belong to you there is really no other way of expressing it, and that is not strong enough.
Franz Kafka
Image
I can love only what I can place so high above me that I cannot reach it.
Franz Kafka
Image
There was once a community of scoundrels, that is to say, they were not scoundrels, but ordinary people.
Franz Kafka
Image
The notion of the infinite expanse and copiousness of the cosmos is the result of the mixture, carried to the extreme limit, of laborious creation and free self-determination.
Franz Kafka
Image
The more horses you yoke the quicker everything will go - not the rending of the block from its foundation, which is impossible, but the snapping of the traces and with that the gay and empty journey.
Franz Kafka
Image
Towards the avoidance of a piece of verbal confusion: What is intended to be actively destroyed must first of all have been firmly grasped what crumbles away crumbles away, but cannot be destroyed.
Franz Kafka