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.

May I kiss you then? On this miserable paper? I might as well open the window and kiss the night air.

If a man has his eyes bound, you can encourage him as much as you like to stare through the bandage, but he’ll never see anything.

Es gibt zwei menschliche Hauptsünden, aus welchen sich alle andern ableiten: Ungeduld und Lässigkeit. Wegen der Ungeduld sind sie aus dem Paradiese vertrieben worden, wegen der Lässigkeit kehren sie nicht zurück. Vielleicht aber gibt es...

I am, because my little dog knows I am.

How can one take delight in the world unless one flees to it for refuge?

A book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us.

One must not cheat anyone, not even the world of its victory.

But what if all the tranquility, all the comfort, all the contentment were now to come to a horrifying end?

My job is unbearable to me because it conflicts with my only desire and my only calling, which is literature. Since I am nothing but literature and can and want to be nothing else, my...

You once said that you would like to sit beside me while I write. Listen, in that case I could not write at all. For writing means revealing oneself to excess; that utmost of self-revelation...

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

The fact that our task is exactly commensurate with our life gives it the appearance of being infinite.

Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.

There is nothing besides a spiritual world; what we call the world of the senses is the Evil in the spiritual world, and what we call Evil is only the necessity of a moment in...

Writing is prayer.

I am forever fettered to myself […] and that’s what I must try to live with.

É bom quando nossa consciência sofre grandes ferimentos, pois isso a torna mais sensível a cada estímulo. Penso que devemos ler apenas livros que nos ferem, que nos afligem. Se o livro que estamos lendo...

Association with human beings lures one into self-observation.

If the French were German in their essence, then how the Germans would admire them!

Life’s splendor forever lies in wait about each one of us in all its fullness, but veiled from view, deep down, invisible, far off. It is there, though, not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If...

Incidentally, it’s easy to write prescriptions, but difficult to come to an understanding with people.

The meaning of life is that it stops.

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading...

I do not speak as I think, I do not think as I should, and so it all goes on in helpless darkness.

So long as you have food in your mouth, you have solved all questions for the time being.

I do not read advertisements. I would spend all of my time wanting things.

The experience of life consists of the experience which the spirit has of itself in matter and as matter, in mind and as mind, in emotion, as emotion, etc.

The Bible is a sanctum; the world, sputum.

When the little mouse, which was loved as none other was in the mouse-world, got into a trap one night and with a shrill scream forfeited its life for the sight of the bacon, all...

However, Gregor had become much calmer. All right, people did not understand his words any more, although they seemed clear enough to him, clearer than previously, perhaps because had gotten used to them

All human errors are impatience, a premature breaking off of methodical procedure, an apparent fencing-in of what is apparently at issue.

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

The history of mankind is the instant between two strides taken by a traveler.

You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering...

Woman, or more precisely put, perhaps, marriage, is the representative of life with which you are meant to come to terms.

In a way, I was safe writing

One tells as few lies as possible only by telling as few lies as possible and not by having the least possible opportunity to do so.

I see, these books are probably law books, and it is an essential part of the justice dispensed here that you should be condemned not only in innocence but also in ignorance.

Idleness is the beginning of all vice, the crown of all virtues.

It is not necessary that you leave the house. Remain at your table and listen. Do not even listen, only wait. Do not even wait, be wholly still and alone. The world will present itself...

My guiding principle is this: Guilt is never to be doubted.

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.

He is terribly afraid of dying because he hasn’t yet lived.

We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide....

During last night’s insomnia, as these thoughts came and went between my aching temples, I realised once again, what I had almost forgotten in this recent period of relative calm, that I tread a terribly...

I do not read advertisements – I would spend all my time wanting things

If there is a transmigration of souls then I am not yet on the bottom rung. My life is a hesitation before birth.