"Fear of night. Fear of not night."

"Evil is the starry sky of the Good."

"In the struggle between yourself and the world second the world."

"It is only our conception of time that makes us call the Last Judgement by this name. It is, in fact, a kind of martial law."

"I am a very unhappy human being and you, dearest, simply had to be summoned to create an equilibrium for all this misery."

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

"Kill me, or you are a murderer."

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

"You're not cross with me, though?" he said. She pulled her hand away and answered, "No, no, I'm never cross with anyone."

"Shoulder to shoulder, a coordinated movement of the people, their blood no longer confined in the limited circulation of the body but rolling sweetly and yet still returning through the infinite extent of China."

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

"A first sign of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die."

"Concerning this a man once said:Why such reluctance? If you only followed the parablesyou yourselves would become parables and with that rid of all your daily cares.Another said: I bet that is also a parable.The first said: You have won.The second said: But unfortunately only in parable.The first said: No, in reality; in parable you have lost."

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

"Religions get lost as people do."

"I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness."

"Books are a narcotic."

"Since there was nothing at all I was certain of, since I needed to be provided at every instant with a new confirmation of my existence, since nothing was in my very own, undoubted, sole possession, determined unequivocally only by me - in sober truth a disinherited son - naturally I became unsure even of the thing nearest to me, my own body."

"My health is only just good enough for myself alone, not good enough for marriage, let alone fatherhood. Yet when I read your letter, I feel I could overlook even what cannot possibly be overlooked."

"The decisive moment in human evolution is perpetual. That is why the revolutionary spiritual movements that declare all former things worthless are in the right, for nothing has yet happened."

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

"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."

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

"Isolation is a way to know ourselves."

"Other opportunities arise from time to time that almost don't accord with the overall situation, opportunities whereby a word, a glance, a sigh of trust may achieve more than a lifetime of exhausting endeavour."

"There are only two things. Truth and lies. Truth is indivisible, hence it cannot recognize itself; anyone who wants to recognize it has to be a lie."

"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."

"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 our eternal evolution."

"But all remains unchanged."

"So then you're free?' 'Yes, I'm free,' said Karl, and nothing seemed more worthless than his freedom."

"Love is a drama of contradictions."

"I felt so weak and unhappy that I buried my face in the ground: I could not bear the strain of seeing around me the things of the earth. I felt convinced that every movement and every thought was forced, and that one had to be on one's guard against them."

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

"Even the merest gesture is holy if it is filled with faith."

"If you have food in your jaws you have solved all questions for the time being."

"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 another flight of stairs. As long as you don't stop climbing, the stairs won't end, under your climbing feet they will go on growing upwards."

"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 job will never take possession of me, it may, however, shatter me completely, and this is by no means a remote possibility."

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

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

"We are separated from God on two sides; the Fall separates us from Him, the Tree of Life separates Him from us."

"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 a trained scientific eye even to recognize it after that."

"Could K. represent the congregation all by himself? What if he had been a stranger merely visiting the church? That was more or less his position."

"Start with what is right rather than what is acceptable."

"What is written is merely the dregs of experience."

"A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity."

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

"Did he really want this warm room of his, so comfortably fitted with old family furniture, to be transformed into a cave, in which, no doubt, he would be free to crawl about unimpeded in all directions, but only at the price of rapidly and completely forgetting his human past at the same time?"

"Nothing, nothing, the whole long day, nothing."

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

"Suffering is the positive element in this world, indeed it is the only link between this world and the positive."