top of page
Exlpore more Existence quotes

"The important thing is not to survive, but to live."

"Scatter the names of all those who have ever lived over the surface of the knowable cosmos, and it would remain, for all purposes, as unnamed as it was before the small, anomalous flicker of human life appeared on this small, wildly atypical planet."

"Who am I to say that these things might nit be forever? Who is Peter Van Houten to assert as fact the conjecture that our labor is temporary?"

"Eating, drinking, dying - three primary manifestations of the universal and impersonal life. Animals live that impersonal and universal life without knowing its nature. Ordinary people know its nature but don't live it and, if they think seriously about it, refuse to accept it. An enlightened person knows it, lives it, and accepts it completely. He eats, he drinks, and in due course he dies - but he eats with a difference, drinks with a difference, dies with a difference."

"If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning."
Explore more quotes by Franz Kafka

"Test yourself on mankind. It is something that makes the doubter doubt, the believer believe."

"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."

"It would have been so pointless to kill himself that, even if he had wanted to, the pointlessness would have made him unable."

"It is as if I were made of stone, as if I were my own tombstone, there is no loophole for doubt or for faith, for love or repugnance, for courage or anxiety, in particular or in general, only a vague hope lives on, but no better than the inscriptions on tombstones."

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

"Sensual love deceives one as to the nature of heavenly love; it could not do so alone, but since it unconsciously has the element of heavenly love within it, it can do so."

"One idiot is one idiot. Two idiots are two idiots. Ten thousand idiots are a political party."

"The existence of the writer is an argument against the existence of the soul, for the soul has obviously taken flight from the real ego, but not improved itself, only become a writer."
bottom of page