Top 100 Stefan Zweig Quotes

#1. Something indefinite is always worse than something definite, a strong fear that doesn't last very long is easier than one that's nebulous but doesn't go away.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #70778
#2. Pity, like morphine, does the sick good only at first. It is a means of helping them to feel better, but if you don't get the dose right and know where to stop it becomes a murderous poison.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #75917
#3. But there, war does not care for predetermination; it also destroys in fury that wich is immaterial, the hopes and expectations (from Requiem for a Hotel /Nekrolog auf ein Hotel,1918)

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #96714
#4. All office workers are afraid of being late for work.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #109823
#5. But theoretical, imagined suffering is not what distresses a man and destroys his peace of mind. Only what you have seen with pitying eyes can really shake you.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #122661
#6. Maybe everything's not so hard, maybe life is so much easier than I thought, you just need courage, you just need to have a sense of yourself, then you'll discover your hidden resources.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #133053
#7. The woman who had been born in an imperial palace, and then, as Queen of France, had had hundreds of rooms in her dwelling house, was now imprisoned in a tiny basement cell, its walls streaming with damp, and its grated window half occluded.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #135440
#8. She could be lively only in the midst of life; in isolation she dwindled to a shadow.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #148834
#9. It remains an irrefragable law of history that contemporaries are denied a recognition of the early beginnings of the great movements which determine their times.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #178609
#10. Long-protracted suffering is apt to exhaust not only the invalid, but the compassion of others; violent emotions cannot be prolonged endlessly.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #217681
#11. That is how our arch-adventurer likes to live, moving on from explosion to explosion of fortune and misfortune.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #243415
#12. In the last analysis it seems likely that they were wiser than I, all those friends in Vienna, because they suffered everything only when it really happened, whereas I had already suffered the disaster in advance in my fantasy, and then again when it became reality.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #244574
#13. There is nothing that so raises a young man's self-esteem, that so contributes to the formation of his character as for him to find himself unexpectedly confronted with a task which he has to accomplish entirely on his own initiative and by his own efforts.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #258792
#14. the ruin insufficiently ruined,

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #293426
#15. Dostoevsky was the first to reveal to us this teeming multiplicity of emotions, this complexity of our spiritual universe.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #298157
#16. It is a law of life that human beings, even the geniuses among them, do not pride themselves on their actual achievements but thatthey want to impress others, want to be admired and respected because of things of much lower import and value.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #317617
#17. But I see nothing miraculous about it. Nothing makes one as healthy as happiness, and there is no greater happiness than making someone else happy.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #326199
#18. The more one limits oneself, the closer one is to the infinite; these people, as unworldly as they seem, burrow like termites into their own particular material to construct, in miniature, a strange and utterly individual image of the world

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #332910
#19. The strength of a love is always misjudged if we evaluate it by its immediate cause and not the stress that went before it, the dark and hollow space full of disappointment and loneliness that precedes all the great events in the heart's history.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #334752
#20. Not one of the European rulers would put himself about in the attempt to save Marie Antoinette, so that Mercy scornfully declared: "They would not have tried to save her even if they had with their own eyes seen her mounting the steps to the guillotine.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #358099
#21. We are happy when people/things conform and unhappy when they don't. People and events don't disappoint us, our models of reality do. It is my model of reality that determines my happiness or disappointments.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #382487
#22. Fear is a distorting mirror in which anything can appear as a caricature of itself, stretched to terrible proportions; once inflamed, the imagination pursues the craziest and most unlikely possibilities. What is most absurd suddenly seems the most probable.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #415824
#23. IF I TRY TO FIND some useful phrase to sum up the time of my childhood and youth before the First World War, I hope I can put it most succinctly by calling it the Golden Age of Security.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #424404
#24. It is the way of youth that each fresh piece of knowledge of life should go to its head, and that once uplifted by an emotion it can never have enough of it.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #435877
#25. The subject of a rumor is always the last to hear it.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #443364
#26. Exalt yourself by devoting yourself to others, enrich yourself by making everyone's destiny your own, by enduring and understanding every facet of human suffering through your pity.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #454146
#27. He who studies without passion will never become anything more than a pedant.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #496917
#28. My today and each of my yesterdays, my rises and falls, are so diverse that I sometimes feel as if I had lived not one, but several existences, each one different from the others.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #520727
#29. Life is futile unless it be directed towards a definite goal.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #521200
#30. The Battle of Waterloo is a work of art with tension and drama with its unceasing change from hope to fear and back again, changewhich suddenly dissolves into a moment of extreme catastrophe, a model tragedy because the fate of Europe was determined within this individual fate.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #525665
#31. In this instant, shaken to her very depths, this ecstatic human being has a first inkling that the soul is made of stuff so mysteriously elastic that a single event can make it big enough to contain the infinite.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #536173
#32. On the whole, more men had perhaps escaped into the war than from it.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #547777
#33. He was, like everyone of a strongly erotic disposition, twice as good, twice as much himself when he knew that women liked him, just as many actors find their most ardent vein when they sense that they have cast their spell over the audience, the breathing mass of spectators before them.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #588437
#34. Never have I experienced in a people and in myself so powerful a surge of life as at that period when our very existence and survival were at stake.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #594219
#35. Nothing was done to us - we were simply placed in a complete void, and everyone knows that nothing on earth exerts such pressure on the human soul as a void.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #618860
#36. I had learned and written too much history not to know that the great masses always and at once respond to the force of gravity in the direction of the powers that be. I knew that the same voices which yelled "Heil Schuschnigg" today would thunder "Heil Hitler" tomorrow.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #633098
#37. Art can bring us consolation as individuals," he said, "but it is powerless against reality.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #654677
#38. The union of opposites, in so far as they are really complementary, always results in the most perfect harmony; and the seemingly incongruous is often the most natural.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #672901
#39. If you are going to sell yourself, you should at least get a good price.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #722288
#40. All things considered, he stuck to his basic attitude of enjoying wealth by knowing that he had it, rather than by making a great display of it.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #728370
#41. Being sent to bed is a terrible command to all children, because it means the most public possible humiliation in front of adults, the confession that they bear the stigma of childhood, of being small and having a child's need for sleep.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #730492
#42. A human being will accept the strictest disciplinary measures with a better grace if he knows that they will fall with equal severity on his neighbor.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #749709
#43. intelligence, its tenets those of division, regression, hatred, violence and persecution. In

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #753614
#44. It is only the immeasurable, the limitless that terrifies us. That which is set within defined, fixed limits is a challenge to our powers, comes to be the measure of our strength.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #754818
#45. Freedom is not possible without authority - otherwise it would turn into chaos and authority is not possible without freedom - otherwise it would turn into tyranny.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #771133
#46. The instinct for self-deception in human beings makes them try to banish from their minds dangers of which at bottom they are perfectly aware by declaring them non-existent.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #794537
#47. All I know is that I shall be alone again. There is nothing more terrible than to be alone among human beings.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #809575
#48. Only in youth does coincidence seem the same as fate. Later, we know that the real course of our lives is decided within us; our paths may seem to diverge from our wishes in a confused and pointless way, but in the end the way always leads us to our invisible destination.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #827608
#49. Often the presence of mind and energy of a person remote from the spotlight decide the course of history for centuries to come.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #831670
#50. You don't run amok for long with impunity, you're bound to be struck down in the end ...

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #843681
#51. For tradition also and always means inhibition.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #854663
#52. For the first time I began to perceive that true sympathy cannot be switched on and off like an electric current, that anyone that identifies himself with the fate of another is robbed to some extent of his own freedom.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #879686
#53. With Nietzsche, the black pirates' flag appears for the first time on the high sea of German knowledge. (He is) a different man, from a different race, (his,) a new kind of heroism, philosophywith bellicose weapons and armor.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #900702
#54. The longest voyage of discovery, the boldest adventure in the records of our race, had begun.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #912464
#55. Today, for a Jew who writes in the German language, it is totally impossible to make a living. In no group do I see as much misery, disappointment, desperation and hopelessness as in Jewish writers who write in German.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #914438
#56. Once shame touches your being at any point, even the most distant nerve is implicated, whether you know it or not; any fleeting encounter or random thought will rake up the anguish and add to it.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #928761
#57. Only the rare expands our minds, only as we shudder in the face of a new force do our feelings increase. Therefore the extraordinary is always the measure of all greatness. And the creative element always remains the value superior to all others and the mind superior to our minds.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #1007451
#58. In history, the moments during which reason and reconciliation prevail are short and fleeting.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #1026284
#59. Health alone does not suffice. To be happy, to become creative, man must always be strengthened by faith in the meaning of his own existence.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #1036557
#60. For I regard memory not as a phenomenon preserving one thing and losing another merely by chance, but as a power that deliberately places events in order or wisely omits them. Everything we forget about our own lives was really condemned to oblivion by an inner instinct long ago.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #1094510
#61. Why is it that the stupidest people are always the most good-natured?

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #1097628
#62. Now I am discovering the world once more. England has widened my horizon.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #1104726
#63. For the more a man limits himself, the nearer he is on the other hand to what is limitless; it is precisely those who are apparently aloof from the world who build for themselves a remarkable and thoroughly individual world in miniature, using their own special equipment, termit-like.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #1109243
#64. But this first installation was by no means the last. Every year the Queen had some new fancy for beautifying her miniature kingdom with more highly artificial and more "natural" additions and alterations.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #1117381
#65. Truth to tell, we are all criminals if we remain silent ...

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #1139403
#66. Happy people are poor psychologists.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #1179993
#67. A word is nothing unless it has values and an atmosphere, unless you grasp its historical significance.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #1200344
#68. To grow old means to be rid of anxieties about the past.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #1213365
#69. But spite is a wonderful thing for keeping people alive.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #1253534
#70. For vanity, too, inebriates; gratitude, too, intoxicates; tenderness, too, can blissfully confuse the senses.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #1253884
#71. Only the misfortune of exile can provide the in-depth understanding and the overview into the realities of the world.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #1265518
#72. Two suitcases, in one the wardrobe, the earthly essentials, in the other- manuscripts, the spiritual supplies, then you are at home everywhere-Zweig GW Tagebuecher p. 383

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #1267421
#73. As everyone knows, it is a thousand times easier to reconstruct the facts of what happened at a certain time than its intellectual atmosphere. The atmosphere is reflected not in official events but, most conspicuously, in small, personal episodes...

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #1301899
#74. Names have a mysterious transforming power. Like a ring on a finger, a name may at first seem merely accidental, committing you to nothing; but before you realize its magical power, it's gotten under your skin, become part of you and your destiny.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #1320746
#75. It always demands a far greater degree of courage for an individual to oppose an organized movement than to let himself be carried along with the stream - individual courage, that is, a variety of courage that is dying out in these times of progressive organization and mechanization.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #1326786
#76. That the whole nation, tired of war, actually only longed for order, quiet, and a little security and bourgeois life. And, secretly it hated the republic, not because it suppressed this wild freedom, but on the contrary, because it held the reins too loosely.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #1337025
#77. There is no sense to a sacrifice after you come to feel that it is a sacrifice.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #1359701
#78. When it looks at great accomplishments, the world, bent on simplifying its images, likes best to look at the dramatic, picturesquemoments experienced by its heroes ... But the no less creative years of preparation remain in the shadow.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #1361731
#79. There is nothing more vindictive, nothing more underhanded, than a little world that would like to be a big one.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #1383243
#80. Pain is a coward. He flees when faced by the irresistible power of the will-to-live, which is more strongly rooted in the flesh than the intensest passion is rooted in the spirit.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #1385712
#81. Ah, how fatefully swift is the move from one feeling to another.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #1405150
#82. The power of love is not properly gauged if it is estimated only by the object that inspires it, if the tension preceding it is not taken into account - that gloomy space of disillusionment and loneliness which stretches in front of all the great events of the heart.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #1442688
#83. Only the person who has experienced light and darkness, war and peace, rise and fall, only that person has truly experienced life.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #1457615
#84. Happiness would prevail where trees were planted.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #1464988
#85. For the first time in my life I had received an assurance that I had been of use to someone on this earth, and my astonishment at the thought that I, a commonplace, unsophisticated young officer, should really have the power to make someone else so happy knew no bounds.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #1472447
#86. He sensed the presence of death, he sensed the presence of undying love: something broke open inside him, and he thought of the invisible woman, incorporeal and passionate, as one might think of distant music.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #1478748
#87. Consciously or unconsciously, our education renders us slaves to morals, religion and a perceived vision of the world; our breath is the air of the epoch in which we live.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #1483866
#88. Everything in life that deviates from the straight and, so to speak, normal line, makes people first curious and then indignant.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #1485836
#89. She wanted, out of a kind of mysterious vindictiveness born of despair, to torture us with her torture, to arraign us, the hale and hearty, in the place of God.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #1590538
#90. One never gets to know a person's character better than by watching his behavior during decisive moments ... It is always only danger which forces the most deeply hidden strengths and abilities of a human being to come forth.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #1590981
#91. He felt a kind of bridal expectation, sweet and sensuous yet vaguely mingled with anticipatory fear of its own fulfilment, with the mysterious shiver felt when something endlessly desired suddenly comes physically close to the astonished heart.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #1599256
#92. Immanuel Kant lived with knowledge as with his lawfully wedded wife, slept with it in the same intellectual bed for forty years and begot an entire German race of philosophical systems.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #1619161
#93. The sight of a wedding always has a disturbing effect on young girls; at such moments a mysterious sense of solidarity with their own sex takes possession of them.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #1631337
#94. Besides, isn't it confoundedly easy to think you're a great man if you aren't burdened with the slightest idea that Rembrandt, Beethoven, Dante or Napoleon ever lived?

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #1638963
#95. He lived one of those lives that seem otiose because they are not linked to any community of interest, because all the riches stored in them by a thousand separate valuable experiences will pass when their last breath is drawn, without anyone to inherit them.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #1650737
#96. Time to leave now, get out of this room, go somewhere, anywhere; sharpen this feeling of happiness and freedom, stretch your limbs, fill your eyes, be awake, wider awake, vividly awake in every sense and every pore.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #1664097
#97. How terrible this darkness was, how bewildering, and yet mysteriously beautiful!

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #1758826
#98. In chess, as a purely intellectual game, where randomness is excluded, - for someone to play against himself is absurd ...
It is as paradoxical, as attempting to jump over his own shadow.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #1838927
#99. What a mercy, I thought, that the crippled, the maimed, those whom Fate has cheated, at least in sleep have no knowledge of the shapeliness or unshapeliness of their bodies,

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #1854593
#100. Were uproariously demanding relief from their intolerable miseries - in this Potemkin sideshow there prevailed a preposterous and mendacious comfort.

Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes #1879134

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