“Life is an effort that deserves a better cause.”
Half-Truths and One-And-A-Half Truths (1976)
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Karl Kraus 94
Czech playwright and publicist 1874–1936Related quotes
Source: The Letters of Vincent van Gogh
“If I had caused the cloud, it was my duty to make an effort to dispel it.”
Source: Wuthering Heights
1900s, Address at the Prize Day Exercises at Groton School (1904)
Context: Of course, the worst of all lives is the vicious life; the life of a man who becomes a positive addition to the forces of evil in a community. Next to that and when I am speaking to people who, by birth and training and standing, ought to amount to a great deal, I have a right to say only second to it in criminality comes the life of mere vapid ease, the ignoble life of a man who desires nothing from his years but that they shall be led with the least effort, the least trouble, the greatest amount of physical enjoyment or intellectual enjoyment of a mere dilettante type. The life that is worth living, and the only life that is worth living, is the life of effort, the life of effort to attain what is worth striving for.
“Life and love generate effort, but effort will not generate them.”
Source: The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966), p. 56
Context: Living, loving, being natural or sincere—all these are spontaneous forms of behavior: they happen "of themselves" like digesting food or growing hair. As soon as they are forced they acquire that unnatural, contrived, and phony atmosphere which everyone deplores—weak and scentless like forced flowers and tasteless like forced fruit. Life and love generate effort, but effort will not generate them. Faith—in life, in other people, and in oneself—is the attitude of allowing the spontaneous to be spontaneous, in its own way and in its own time.
2014, Address to the United Nations (September 2014)