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Franz Kafka: Photographic portrait, 1923Photographic portrait, 1923Unknown photographer · Public domain

158 collected words

Franz Kafka

Life dates: 1883 AD — 1924 AD

German-language writer from Prague whose stories and unfinished novels place ordinary-seeming people in disorienting encounters with power and uncertainty.

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Life and writing

Franz Kafka (1883–1924) wrote in German and is closely associated with Prague. His work includes The Metamorphosis and novels such as The Trial. Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries preserve a major collection of his papers, making the manuscripts important evidence alongside published editions.

Kafka’s stories have continued to invite literary, artistic and scholarly reinterpretation. The Oxford centenary programme places the manuscripts and their reception together. That context matters when a short passage circulates alone: an isolated narrator’s words are not automatically the author’s personal instruction.

Reading this voice

Notice who is speaking and what the situation makes uncertain. Kafka’s unsettling scenes can be comic as well as disturbing; a single explanatory slogan may miss their ambiguity. A biographical profile does not verify the translation or attribution of every imported quotation.

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Profile sources and editorial notes

Agent-assisted editorial profile, updated 2026-10-08. A human reviewer is not recorded. Biographical context does not independently authenticate every quotation attributed to this person.

Quotations and sayings

16c. 1903 AD
I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn't shake us awake like a blow on the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we'd be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, also write ourselves. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe.
Franz Kafka / quote
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20c. 1903 AD
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 other than this fear we have so often talked about, but fear spread to everything, fear of the greatest as of the smallest, fear, paralyzing fear of pronouncing a word, although this fear may not only be fear but also a longing for something greater than all that is fearful.
Franz Kafka / quote
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22c. 1903 AD
In general I lacked principally the ability to provide even in the slightest detail for the real future. I thought only of things in the present and their present condition, not because of thoroughness or any special, strong interest, but rather, to the extent that weakness in thinking was not the cause, because of sorrow and fear – sorrow, because the present was so sad for me that I thought I could not leave it before it resolved itself into happiness; fear, because, like my fear of the slightest action in the present, I also considered myself, in view of my contemptible, childish appearance, unworthy of forming a serious, responsible opinion of the great, manly future which usually seemed so impossible to me that every short step forward appeared to me to be counterfeit and the next step unattainable.
Franz Kafka / quote
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