Franz Kafka Art Quotations

It requires enormous presence of mind or rather quickness of wit, when opening your eyes to seize hold as it were of everything in the room at exactly the same place where you had let it go on the previous evening. That is why the moment of waking up was the riskiest moment of the day. Once that was well over without deflecting you from your orbit, you could take heart of grace for the rest of the day.

This morning, for the first time in a long time, the joy again of imagining a knife twisted in my heart.

The Kafka paradox: art depends on truth, but truth, being indivisable, cannot know itself: to tell the truth is to lie. thus the writer is the truth, and yet when he speakes he lies.

Art flies around truth, but with the definite intention of not getting burnt. Its capacity lies in finding in the dark void a place where the beam of light can be intensely caught, without this having been perceptible before.

Palestine needs earth, but it does not need lawyers.

The Fathers of the Church were not afraid to go out into the desert because they had a richness in their hearts. But we, with richness all around us, are afraid, because the desert is in our hearts.

Picasso only registers the deformities which have not yet penetrated our consciousness. Art is a mirror which goes 'fast' like a watch - sometimes.

Human judgment of human actions is true and void , that is to say, first true and then void.... The judgment of the word is true, the judgment in itself is void.... Only he who is a party can really judge, but as a party he cannot judge. Hence it follows that there is no possibility of judgment in the world, only a glimmer of it.

Our art is a way of being dazzled by truth: the light on the grotesquely grimacing retreating face is true, and nothing else.

The dream reveals the reality which conception lags behind. That is the horror of life-the terror of art.

This perversion of the truth, familiar to the artist though it was, always unnerved him afresh and proved too much for him. What was a consequence of the premature ending of his fast was here presented as the cause of it! To fight against this lack of understanding, against a whole world of nonunderstanding, was impossible.

There art two cardinal sins from which all others spring: Impatience and Laziness.

Atlas was permitted the opinion that he was at liberty, if he wished, to drop the Earth and creep away; but this opinion was all that he was permitted.

I answer one of your letters, then lie in bed in apparent calm, but my heart beats through my entire body and is conscious only of you. I belong to you; there is really no other way of expressing it, and that is not strong enough.

Art is for the artist is only suffering through which he releases himself for further suffering.

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

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