Top 11 Quotes & Sayings by Joseph Roth

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an Austrian novelist Joseph Roth.

Last updated on April 14, 2025.

Moses Joseph Roth was an Austrian journalist and novelist, best known for his family saga Radetzky March (1932), about the decline and fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, his novel of Jewish life Job (1930) and his seminal essay "Juden auf Wanderschaft", a fragmented account of the Jewish migrations from eastern to western Europe in the aftermath of World War I and the Russian Revolution. In the 21st century, publications in English of Radetzky March and of collections of his journalism from Berlin and Paris created a revival of interest in Roth.

Austrian - Novelist | September 2, 1894 - May 27, 1939

Source: Wikipedia

A lot of truths about the living world are recorded in bad books; they are just badly written about.

Joseph Roth

I am not an encore, not a pudding, I am the main dish.

Joseph Roth

That is originally why the concept evolved to include accessories. We found that furniture sells better when you show it with accessories.

Joseph Roth

Although the noise of the chattering clientele is much more significant than the topics of their chatter, it does finally constitute that type of social and indistinct expression that we refer to as rhubarb. The very particular volume in which people tell each other their news seems to generate all by itself that acoustic chiaroscuro, a sounding murk, in which every communication seems to lose its edges, truth projects the shadow of a lie, and a statement seems to resemble its opposite.

Joseph Roth

Anyway, I am unfitted to hold down a job anywhere unless they were to pay me for getting angry at the world." 96

Joseph Roth

The escalator seems to me to typify this: It leads us up, by climbing on our behalf. Yes, it doesn't even climb, it flies. Each step carries its shopper aloft, as though afraid he might change his mind. It takes us up to merchandise we might not have bothered to climb an ordinary flight of steps for.

Joseph Roth

Only the small things in life are important

Joseph Roth

I believe that my observations have always led me to find that the so-called realist moves about the world with a closed mind, ringed as it were with concrete and cement, and that the so-called romantic is like an unfenced garden in and out of which truth can wander at will.

Joseph Roth

That was how things were back then. Anything that grew took its time growing, and anything that perished took a long time to be forgotten. But everything that had once existed left its traces, and people lived on memories just as they now live on the ability to forget quickly and emphatically.

Joseph Roth

There is a fear of voluptuousness that is itself voluptuous, just as a certain fear of death can itself be deadly.

Joseph Roth

A moving shadow means more to us than a body at rest. We are no longer taken in by a fixed grin. We know that only death has a rictus.

Joseph Roth