Joseph Roth Quotes

You too must not count too much on your reality as you feel it today, since like yesterday, it may prove an illusion for you tomorrow.

EXISTENCE, n. A transient, horrible, fantastic dream,/ Wherein is nothing yet all things do seem:/ From which we're wakened by a friendly nudge/ Of our bedfellow Death, and cry: "O fudge!"

Nothing is absolute. Everything changes, everything moves, everything revolves, everything flies and goes away.

Our nature consists in motion; complete rest is death.

We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.

The dead see what they believe they will see. So do the living. That is the secret.

Notre nature est dans le mouvement; le repos entier est la mort. Our nature consists in movement; absolute rest is death.

A hundred years from now, people will look back on us and laugh. They'll say, 'You know what people used to believe? They believed in photons and electrons. Can you imagine anything so silly?' They'll have a good laugh, because by then there will be newer better fantasies... And meanwhile, you feel the way the boat moves? That's the sea. That's real. You smell the salt in the air? You feel the sunlight on your skin? That's all real. Life is wonderful. It's a gift to be alive, to see the sun and breathe the air. And there isn't really anything else.

Life is but a dream for the dead.

We all just keep moving, September. We keep moving until we stop.

Our nature lies in movement; complete calm is death.

All motion is relative. Maybe it's you who've moved away by standing still.

Illusions are the truths we live by until we know better.

It may look like I'm moving but I'm standing still.

Everything of this life as a mortal is fiction. It seems real, but...

A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life.

There's certainly nothing lasting and definite about the theater.

Love to his soul gave eyes; he knew things are not as they seem. The dream is his real life; the world around him is the dream.

Life is only a dream and we are the imagination of ourselves.

As a son of a man who pretended to be one thing for 33 years of my life and then was another thing, the questions of 'what is real' and 'what is not real' are very blurrily vivid to me.

All things are only transitory.

What is life? A madness. What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a story. And the greatest good is little enough; for all life is a dream, and dreams themselves are only dreams.

Time is only an idea. There is only the Reality. Whatever you think it is, it looks like that. If you call it time, it is time. If you call it existence, it is existence, and so on. After calling it time, you divide it into days and nights, months, years, hours, minutes, etc. Time is immaterial for the Path of Knowledge.

Life and death are illusions. We are in a constant state of transformation.

Perhaps life is just that... a dream and a fear.