In the fight between you and the world, back the world.

This aphoristic line is commonly attributed to Franz Kafka and is typically treated as a note-like maxim rather than a statement from his published fiction. It aligns with the tone of Kafka’s private writings—brief, paradoxical, and self-accusatory—where he often frames the individual as already implicated in guilt or error when set against impersonal forces (“the world,” authority, necessity). The quote circulates widely in English in collections of Kafka’s aphorisms and notebooks, though it is often presented without clear situational framing, suggesting it originated as a standalone reflection rather than a remark tied to a specific event or interlocutor.

The sentence reads as a deliberately unsettling counsel: when your private sense of rightness clashes with “the world,” assume the world is correct. Taken literally, it advocates radical self-suspicion and submission to external reality; taken ironically, it exposes how social and institutional “worlds” can compel the individual to internalize blame. The power of the line lies in its ambiguity: it can be heard as moral discipline (check your ego, accept limits) or as a bleak diagnosis of modern life (the world’s verdict prevails regardless of justice). Either way, it captures Kafka’s recurring tension between inner conviction and an overwhelming, often opaque external order.