"By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it. The nonexistent is whatever we have not sufficiently desired"
About this Quote
Kafka’s line is a dare disguised as a paradox: treat imagination not as escapism, but as a kind of engine. “Believing passionately” isn’t gentle optimism; it’s an insistence strong enough to reorganize your life around an absence. The first clause flatters the reader with agency - we “create it” - then the second tightens into something more unsettling. The “nonexistent” isn’t neutral emptiness. It’s an indictment: what you lack might be what you failed to want with sufficient ferocity.
That turn is pure Kafka: the sentence offers liberation in the language of conviction, then smuggles in a quiet authoritarian logic. If the world doesn’t change, it’s because your desire wasn’t adequate. The subtext reads like an internalized bureaucracy, where reality becomes a file you didn’t complete correctly. It’s motivational, but also accusatory - a philosophy that can empower artists and dissidents, while also feeding self-blame when structures don’t budge.
Context matters. Kafka wrote from within the machinery of early 20th-century Central Europe: a life of office work, institutional rules, and modern alienation that his fiction made uncanny. Against that backdrop, “creating” the nonexistent through belief sounds less like New Age manifesting and more like resistance to a world that insists the possible is already fully enumerated. He’s pointing to how futures get built first as private heresies - desired, rehearsed, spoken aloud - before they harden into plans, movements, art, or escape routes.
It works because it refuses comfort: it makes desire political, and failure personal, in the same breath.
That turn is pure Kafka: the sentence offers liberation in the language of conviction, then smuggles in a quiet authoritarian logic. If the world doesn’t change, it’s because your desire wasn’t adequate. The subtext reads like an internalized bureaucracy, where reality becomes a file you didn’t complete correctly. It’s motivational, but also accusatory - a philosophy that can empower artists and dissidents, while also feeding self-blame when structures don’t budge.
Context matters. Kafka wrote from within the machinery of early 20th-century Central Europe: a life of office work, institutional rules, and modern alienation that his fiction made uncanny. Against that backdrop, “creating” the nonexistent through belief sounds less like New Age manifesting and more like resistance to a world that insists the possible is already fully enumerated. He’s pointing to how futures get built first as private heresies - desired, rehearsed, spoken aloud - before they harden into plans, movements, art, or escape routes.
It works because it refuses comfort: it makes desire political, and failure personal, in the same breath.
Quote Details
| Topic | Motivational |
|---|
More Quotes by Franz
Add to List
