Daily Inspiration Quote by Franz Kafka

Kafka’s genius is to make truth feel less like a conclusion you reach and more like a condition you endure. “Not everyone can see the truth, but he can be it” splits truth into two registers: the public, legible kind (seen) and the private, embodied kind (lived). The first depends on recognition, institutions, and shared language; the second is stubbornly physical and solitary. In Kafka’s world, the social machinery that’s supposed to certify reality - courts, offices, families - is exactly what blinds people to it. So the sentence offers a bleak workaround: if the system won’t acknowledge what’s real, you can still become the proof.

The “he” matters. Kafka often casts the individual (usually male, always exposed) as a figure drafted into roles he didn’t choose, then punished for failing to perform them. To “be” the truth isn’t triumphant authenticity; it’s closer to martyrdom or witness. You don’t persuade the crowd. You stand there as an inconvenient fact, and your body carries what others refuse to process.

It also hints at Kafka’s Jewish, Central European modernity: a life where identity is frequently treated as an argument you must constantly defend, and where “truth” isn’t neutral but policed. The line’s power comes from its quiet reversal of epistemology. Seeing is optional, even political; being is irreversible. In a Kafka story, that’s not comfort. It’s the last remaining form of agency: the right to exist as evidence.