Franz Kafka

Anything that has real and lasting value is always a gift from within.

You are free, and that is why you are lost.

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.

You need not leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. You need not even listen, simply wait, just learn to become quiet, 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.

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

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

Now the sirens have a still more fatal weapon than their song, namely their silence... someone might have escaped from their singing; but from their silence, certainly never.

You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, 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.

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

There are two main human sins from which all the others derive: impatience and indolence. It was because of impatience that they were expelled from Paradise, it is because of indolence that they do not return. Yet perhaps there is only one major sin: impatience. Because of impatience they were expelled, because of impatience they do not return.

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

I have the true feeling of myself only when I am unbearably unhappy.

There art two cardinal sins from which all others spring: Impatience and Laziness.