Quotes by Franz Kafka

by Franz Kafka

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. —"The Metamorphosis", opening line.

You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, be quite still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet. —The Great Wall of China. Reflections.

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. . . . We need the books that affect us like a disaster, taht grieve us deepl, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. —Letter to Oskar Pollak, January 27, 1904

Someone must have traduced Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning. —The Trial

We are sinful not merely because we have eaten of the Tree of Knowledge, but also because we have not yet eaten of the Tree of Life. —Parables and Paradoxes: Paradise

Our world is merely a practical joke of God —quoted in A Treasury of Jewish Quotations

Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.

about Franz Kafka

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Sources for Quotations

I use various sources for quotations on this site. Below are the most common sources I use. I also draw from my own collection of quotes and from primary sources.

Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 16th edition. John Bartlett, Justin Kaplan, editors. Little, Brown and Company, Boston, 1992.

BrainyQuote. <http://www.brainyquote.com/>

The Dictionary of Biographical Quotation. Richard Kenin and Justin Wintle, editors. Dorset Press, New York, 1978

The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, fourth edition. Angela Partington, editor. Oxford University Press, Oxford & New York, 1992

Peter's Quotations by Laurence J. Peter. Bantam Books, New York, 1980

The Quotations Page. <http://www.quotationspage.com/>