Quote of the day by Franz Kafka: ‘The truth is always an abyss. One must, as in a swimming pool, dare to…’ – ‘The Metamorphosis’ author on the difficult journey from everyday reality to deeper truth

Everyday life can make the world feel deceptively simple. We wake up, work, speak to people, follow routines and move through familiar places, often accepting what we see without questioning what lies beneath it. But for Franz Kafka, the ordinary world was rarely ordinary. Beneath its routines, he saw fear, desire, loneliness, uncertainty and the difficult questions people often avoid.

That tension between the visible surface of life and the deeper reality underneath it is at the heart of one of Kafka’s striking reflections on truth. His metaphor is unusual: discovering truth is like diving into an abyss from a trembling springboard, only to return to the surface with a transformed understanding of everything that seemed familiar.

Quote of the day

“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.”
- Franz Kafka

The passage comes from Gustav Janouch's recollections of conversations with Kafka, in which Kafka discussed truth, wisdom and the difficulty of understanding oneself and the world. Janouch recalled Kafka connecting the search for truth with diving beneath the apparently mundane surface of existence.

Who was Franz Kafka?

Franz Kafka was born on July 3, 1883, in Prague, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, into a Jewish family. He studied law at the German Karl-Ferdinand University in Prague and subsequently worked in insurance. Although he maintained his professional responsibilities, writing remained his central intellectual and creative pursuit.

Kafka's literary world was filled with characters confronted by incomprehensible institutions, isolation, guilt, anxiety and situations that seemed simultaneously absurd and terrifying. His best-known works include The Metamorphosis, The Trial, The Castle and Amerika, as well as numerous short stories, diaries, letters and fragments. His writing later gave rise to the term “Kafkaesque,” commonly used to describe situations marked by bewildering bureaucracy, helplessness or an oppressive sense of absurdity.

Yet Kafka's life was relatively brief. He developed tuberculosis in 1917 and struggled with the illness for the remaining years of his life. He died on June 3, 1924, at a sanatorium in Kierling, Austria, aged 40.

The writer who almost destroyed his own legacy

There is an extraordinary irony in Kafka's posthumous fame. During his lifetime, he published only a small portion of his work and was deeply dissatisfied with much of what he wrote. Before his death, he asked his close friend Max Brod to destroy his unpublished manuscripts.

Brod did not follow that instruction. Instead, he preserved and published much of Kafka's unfinished work after his friend's death, including novels that would become central to Kafka's reputation. The Kafka Museum notes that much of the writing for which Kafka later became internationally famous survived precisely because Brod disregarded his request.

Kafka therefore became one of literature's most influential writers partly through works he himself never intended the world to read.

What does Kafka mean by this?

Kafka begins with a deliberately unsettling image: “The truth is always an abyss.” An abyss suggests something deep, frightening and potentially bottomless. Truth, in his formulation, is therefore not something comfortably sitting on the surface waiting to be collected. To reach it, one has to descend.

The “quivering springboard” represents the hesitation that comes before that descent. Everyday life is the springboard, familiar routines, assumptions and experiences that feel safe precisely because we rarely examine them too closely. But genuinely understanding ourselves or the world requires the courage to leave that comfortable surface.

The striking part is that Kafka does not describe the descent as purely tragic. The diver eventually comes back “laughing and fighting for breath.” The experience can be frightening and exhausting, but it can also be liberating.

Once someone has confronted something deeper, the ordinary world has changed. That is what Kafka means by the “doubly illuminated surface of things”: the surface has not necessarily changed, but the person looking at it has.

In that sense, the quote is not simply telling people to search for some hidden philosophical answer. It suggests that understanding changes perception. We return to everyday life carrying knowledge that makes familiar things appear different.

Kafka's other words about life, fear and truth

“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”

“Youth is happy because it has the ability to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.”

“You do not need to leave the room. Remain sitting at your table and listen.”

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