The Blue Octavo Notebooks is a truly amazing piece of work. It contains many aphorisms and smaller pieces of writing which were found in Kafka's posthumous papers and were contained in blue octavo notebooks. This is an awe-inspiring book, and I urge anyone who is at all interested in Kafka, or for that matter, life, to read this text in its entirety.  

They were given the chance of becoming kings or the kings' messengers. As is the way with children, they all wanted to be messengers. That is why there are only messengers, racing through the world and, since there are no kings, calling out to each other the messages that have now become meaningless. They would gladly put an end to their miserable life, but they do not dare to do so because of their oath of loyalty.  

He is a free and secure citizen of this earth, for he is attached to a chain that is long enough to make all areas of the earth accessible to him, and yet only so long that nothing can pull him over the edges of the earth. At the same time, however, he is also a free and secure citizen of heaven, for he is also attached to a similarly calculated heavenly chain. Thus, if he wants to get down to earth, he is choked by the heavenly collar and chain; if he wants to get into heaven, he is choked by the earthly one. And in spite of this he has all the possibilities, and feels that it is so; indeed, he even refuses to attribute the whole thing to a mistake in the original chaining.  

  
He runs after facts like a beginner learning to skate, who, furthermore, practices somewhere where it is forbidden.  
 

Adam's first domestic pet after the expulsion from Paradise was the serpent.  
 

If what is supposed to have been destroyed in Paradise was indestructible, then it was not decisive; but if it was indestructible, then we are living in a fake belief.  
 

Truth is indivisible, hence it cannot recognize itself; anyone who wants to recognize it has to be a lie.  
 

The fact that our task is exactly commensurate with our life gives it the appearance of being infinite.  
 

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.