October 30, 2022

10 Inspirational Quotes by Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka (July 3, 1883 – June 3, 1924) was a Prague German-language novelist and short story writer, widely regarded as one of the major figures of 20th-century literature. His work, which fuses elements of realism and the fantastic, typically features isolated protagonists faced by bizarre or surrealistic predicaments and incomprehensible social-bureaucratic powers, and has been interpreted as exploring themes of alienation, existential anxiety, guilt, and absurdity. His best known works include "Die Verwandlung" ("The Metamorphosis"), Der Process (The Trial), and Das Schloss (The Castle).
Franz Kafka Bibliography:
[source: Franz Kafka Online]

Novels:
The Trial (1925)
The Castle (1926)
America (1927)

Novellas/Short Stories
The Judgement (1913)
Meditation (1913)
In the Penal Colony (1914)
The Metamorphosis (1915)
A Country Doctor (1916)
A Report to an Academy (1919)
Letters to His Father (1919)
The Burrow(1923)
Josepine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk (1924)
A Hunger Artist (1924)
The Giant Mole (1931)
The Great Wall of China (1933)
Investigations of a Dog (1933)
Before the Law (1933)
Blumfield, an Elderly Bachelor (1933)
Description of a Struggle (1936)
The Diaries of Franz Kafka 1910-23 (1951)
Letters to Milena (1952)
Letters 1902-24 (1958) (ed. by M. Brod)
Letters to Felice (1967)
Letters to Ottla and the Family (1974)
Letters to Friends, Family and Editors (1977)
The term Kafkaesque has entered the English language to describe situations like those in his writing.

Kafka was born into a middle-class, German-speaking Jewish family in Prague, the capital of the Kingdom of Bohemia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, today part of the Czech Republic. He trained as a lawyer, and after completing his legal education he was employed with an insurance company, forcing him to relegate writing to his spare time. Over the course of his life, Kafka wrote hundreds of letters to family and close friends, including his father, with whom he had a strained and formal relationship. He became engaged to several women but never married. He died in 1924 at the age of 40 from tuberculosis.

10 Inspirational Quotes by Franz Kafka

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

2. 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.

3. Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self.

4. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.

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

6. They say ignorance is bliss... they're wrong.

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

8. First impressions are always unreliable.

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

10. God gives the nuts, but he does not crack them.

BONUS

You are at once both the quiet and the confusion of my heart.

BONUS BONUS

The truth is always an abyss. One must — as in a swimming pool — dare to dive from the quivering springboard of trivial everyday experience and sink into the depths, in order to later rise again — laughing and fighting for breath — to the now doubly illuminated surface of things.

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