Quote by Franz Kafka: “A cage went in search of a bird.”

In normal life, captivity is built around something that already exists. Here the cage comes first — a system designed to trap before anyone has even arrived. This is about how institutions, laws, and social structures are built to contain people rather than serve them.

Kafka wrote this aphorism in the notebooks known as the Zürau Aphorisms during the autumn and winter of 1917, while recovering from tuberculosis at his sister's farm. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was disintegrating under the pressures of the First World War. His compact, paradoxical observations from this period are among the most compressed philosophical writing of the century.

Czech-German writer whose novels and stories, including The Trial and The Metamorphosis, created a body of work so distinctive that 'Kafkaesque' entered everyday language as a description of nightmarish bureaucracy. Writing mostly in German, he published little in his lifetime and asked his friend Max Brod to burn his manuscripts after his death.