Gregor’s serious wound, from which he suffered for over a month – the apple remained imbedded in his flesh as a visible souvenir since no one dared to remove it – seemed to have reminded...

I have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in a corner, content that I can breathe.

Isolation is a way to know ourselves.

Evil does not exist; once you have crossed the threshold, all is good. Once in another world, you must hold your tongue.

A First Sign of the Beginning of Understanding is the Wish to Die.

Y, sin embargo, mentiría si dijera que la extraño. Es el hechizo más perfecto y más doloroso. Usted está aquí, igual que yo y con mayor intensidad aún; allí donde yo estoy, está usted, como...

Believing in progress does not mean believing that any progress has yet been made.

“Everything you say is boring and incomprehensible,” she said, “but that alone doesn’t make it true

In argument similes are like songs in love; they describe much, but prove nothing.

It’s impossible to defend oneself in the absence of goodwill

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 speaks he lies.

People who walk across dark bridges, past saints,with dim, small lights.Clouds which move across gray skiespast churcheswith towers darkened in the dusk.One who leans against granite railinggazing into the evening waters,His hands resting on old...

Evidentemente, soy muy ignorante, la verdad es esa, y es muy triste para mi, pero esto supone una ventaja: El ignorante osa a más cosas. También estoy preparado para soportar todavía un poco la ignorancia...

In theory there is a possibility of perfect happiness: To believe in the indestructible element within one, and not to strive towards it.

One advantage in keeping a diary is that you become aware with reassuring clarity of the changes which you constantly suffer.

You may object that it is not a trial at all; you are quite right, for it is only a trial if I recognize it as such.

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

Writing is utter solitude, the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.

Es perfectamente imaginable que el esplendor de la vida está dispuesto, siempre en toda plenitud, alrededor de cada uno, pero cubierto de un velo, en las profundidades, invisible muy lejos. Sin embargo está ahí, no...

Most men are not wicked… They are sleep-walkers, not evil evildoers.

I can prove at any time that my education tried to make another person out of me than the one I became. It is for the harm, therefore, that my educators could have done me...

Tyranny or slavery, born of selfishness, are the two educational methods of parents; all gradations of tyranny or slavery.

In the fight between you and the world, back the world.

Atata timp cat nu incetezi s urci, treptele nu se vOr termina; sub pasii tai care urca, ele se vOr inmulti la nesfarsit

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

She is so distinct to me, it’s as though I had run my hands all over her.

Mientras estaba tendido allí, a un paso de mí yacía un escarabajo, patas arriba, desesperado. No podía enderezarse, me habría gustado ayudarlo, era tan fácil hacerlo, bastaba un paso y un empujoncito para brindarle una...

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

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...

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

From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back.

my heart no longer beats but is a tugging muscle,

What I write is different from what I say, what I say is different from what I think, what I think is different from what I ought to think and so it goes further into...

There art two cardinal sins from which all others spring: impatience and laziness.

One of the first signs of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die.

One must not cheat anybody, not even the world of one’s triumph.

By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired.

I need solitude for my writing; not ‘like a hermit’ – that wouldn’t be enough – but like a dead man.

German is my mother tongue and as such more natural to me, but I consider Czech much more affectionate, which is why your letter removes several uncertainties; I see you more clearly, the movements of...

Every new discovery is assumed at once into the sum total of knowledge, and with that ceases in a sense to be a discovery; it dissolves into the whole and disappears, and one must have...

By imposing too great a responsibility, or rather, all responsibility, on yourself, you crush yourself.

We all have wings, but they have not been of any avail to us and if we could tear them off, we would do so.

A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul.

So if you find nothing in the corridors open the doors, and if you find nothing behind these doors there are more floors, and if you find nothing up there, don’t worry, just leap up...

I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones. Basically it is nothing...

It is only because of their stupidity that they are able to be so sure of themselves.

Ja sam kraj ili početak.

Don’t despair, not even over the fact that you don’t despair.

There will be no proof that I ever was a writer

A stair not worn hollow by footsteps is, regarded from its own point of view, only a boring something made of wood.