Top 100 Stefan Zweig Quotes
#1. For one who is having no personal experience, the passionate disquiet of others is at any rate a titillation of the nerves, like seeing a play or listening to music.
Stefan Zweig
#2. In history as in human life, regret does not bring back a lost moment and a thousand years will not recover something lost in a single hour.
Stefan Zweig
#3. Heroic ages are not and never were sentimental and those daring conquistadores who conquered entire worlds for their Spain or Portugal received lamentably little thanks from their kings.
Stefan Zweig
#4. The dressmaker doesn't have problems unless the dress has to hide rather than reveal.
Stefan Zweig
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. I am an impatient, temperamental reader. Anything long-winded, high-flown or gushing irritates me, so does everything that is vague and indistinct, in fact anything that unnecessarily holds the reader up, whether in a novel, a biography or an intellectual argument.
Stefan Zweig
#8. Art always reaches its peak where it becomes the life interest of a people.
Stefan Zweig
#9. 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
#10. All office workers are afraid of being late for work.
Stefan Zweig
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. Hairdressers are professional gossips; when only the hands are busy, the tongue is seldom still.
Stefan Zweig
#15. She could be lively only in the midst of life; in isolation she dwindled to a shadow.
Stefan Zweig
#16. In times of exceptional stress, nature will often give people's behavior so tragical a complexion that neither a picture nor a verbal description is competent to represent its titanic energy.
Stefan Zweig
#17. When they are preparing for war, those who rule by force speak most copiously about peace until they have completed the mobilization process.
Stefan Zweig
#18. 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
#19. One must be convinced to convince, to have enthusiasm to stimulate the others.
Stefan Zweig
#20. But don't despise error. When touched by genius, when led by chance, the most superior truth can come into being from even the most foolish error. The important inventions which have been brought about in every realm of science from false hypotheses number in the hundreds, indeed in the thousands.
Stefan Zweig
#21. THE WORLD OF YESTERDAY is ostensibly an autobiography but in truth it is much more than that. In this remarkably fine new translation, Anthea Bell perfectly captures Stefan Zweig's glorious evocation of a lost world, Vienna's golden age, in which he grew up and flourished.
Ronald Harwood
#22. Long-protracted suffering is apt to exhaust not only the invalid, but the compassion of others; violent emotions cannot be prolonged endlessly.
Stefan Zweig
#23. Again and again, faith in a possible satisfaction of the human race breaks through at the very moments of most zealous discord because humankind will never be able to live and work without this consoling delusion of its ascent into morality, without this dream of final and ultimate accord.
Stefan Zweig
#24. That is how our arch-adventurer likes to live, moving on from explosion to explosion of fortune and misfortune.
Stefan Zweig
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. Confidences are always risky: a secret entrusted to a stranger make him less of one. You've given away something of yourself, given him the advantage.
Stefan Zweig
#28. The works of the great artists are silent books of eternal truths.
Stefan Zweig
#29. Whilst all the land was ringed with bristling arms
And flames laid waste our world,
All that was left me was a little garden
And thou within it, my beloved, my comrade.
Stefan Zweig
#31. Dostoevsky was the first to reveal to us this teeming multiplicity of emotions, this complexity of our spiritual universe.
Stefan Zweig
#32. Memory is so corrupt that you remember only what you want to; if you want to forget about something, slowly but surely you do.
Stefan Zweig
#33. A first premonition of the rich variety of life had come to him; for the first time he thought he had understood the nature of human beings - they needed each other even when they appeared hostile, and it was very sweet to be loved by them.
Stefan Zweig
#34. But, in history, practical usefulness never determines the moral value of an achievement. Only the person who increases the knowledge humanity has about itself and enhances its creative consciousness permanently enriches humanity.
Stefan Zweig
#35. 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
#36. Nothing that has ever been thought and said with a clear mind and pure ethical strength is totally in vain; even if it comes froma weak hand and is imperfectly formed, it inspires the ethical spirit to constantly renewed creation.
Stefan Zweig
#37. 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
#38. One goes wherever one is still admitted. Someone told me that I might be able to get a visa for Haiti or San Domingo here.
Stefan Zweig
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. That ... that was how I spent the day, just waiting, waiting, waiting ... but waiting like a man running amok, senselessly, like an animal, with that headlong, direct persistance.
Stefan Zweig
#43. One only makes books in order to keep in touch with one's fellows after one has ceased to breath, and thus to defend oneself against the inexorable fate of all that lives - transitoriness and oblivion.
Stefan Zweig
#44. 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
#45. ever since he discovered that all his millions could not bring him back his wife, he has learned to despise money.
Stefan Zweig
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. Only that which points the human spirit beyond its own limitations into what is universally human gives the individual strength superior to his own. Only in suprahuman demands which can hardly be fulfilled do human beings and peoples feel their true and sacred measure.
Stefan Zweig
#49. 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
#50. The subject of a rumor is always the last to hear it.
Stefan Zweig
#51. 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
#52. Nothing on earth puts more pressure on the human mind than nothing.
Stefan Zweig
#53. Once more my pity had been stronger than my will.
Stefan Zweig
#54. Mr. Zweig always encouraged his friends to set down their reminiscences, not necessarily for publication but for the pleasure and benefit of their children, their families. In his opinion every life includes inner or external experiences worthy of record.
Stefan Zweig
#55. He who studies without passion will never become anything more than a pedant.
Stefan Zweig
#56. 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
#57. Life is futile unless it be directed towards a definite goal.
Stefan Zweig
#58. No guilt is forgotten so long as the conscience still knows of it.
Stefan Zweig
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. It would be foolhardy to count on the conscience of the world.
Stefan Zweig
#62. On the whole, more men had perhaps escaped into the war than from it.
Stefan Zweig
#63. For the first time in my life I began to realize that it is not evil and brutality, but nearly always weakness, that is to blame for the worst things that happen in this world.
Stefan Zweig
#64. The idea of Jewish unity, of a plan, an organization, unfortunately exists only in the brains of Hitler and Streicher.
Stefan Zweig
#65. I realized that there was no point in denying oneself a pleasure because it was denied another, in refusing to allow oneself to be happy because someone else was unhappy.
Stefan Zweig
#66. We can't forever be spending our lives paying for political follies that never gave us anything but always took from us, and I amcontent with the narrowest metes and bounds provided I have peace and quiet for work.
Stefan Zweig
#67. We also want to leave our own area behind, our domestic world so well regulated day to day; we are drawn by the desire no longer to be at home and therefore no longer to be ourselves. We want to interrupt a life where we merely exist, in order to live more.
Stefan Zweig
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. He listened yet more intently to what was within him, to the past, to see whether that voice of memory truly foretelling the future would not speak to him again, revealing the present to him as well as the past.
Stefan Zweig
#71. It is never until one realizes that one means something to others that one feels there is any point or purpose in one's own existence.
Stefan Zweig
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. Fate is never too generous even to its favorites. Rarely do the gods grant a mortal more than one immortal deed.
Stefan Zweig
#75. Formerly man had only a body and a soul. Now he needs a passport as well for without it he will not be treated like a human being.
Stefan Zweig
#76. The free, independent spirit who commits himself to no dogma and will not decide in favor of any party has no homestead on earth.
Stefan Zweig
#77. Art can bring us consolation as individuals," he said, "but it is powerless against reality.
Stefan Zweig
#78. Nothing gives so keen an edge to the intelligence as a passionate suspicion.
Stefan Zweig
#79. 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
#80. But in the intellectual world, there is room for all opposing forces: even that which never appears victorious in the real world continues to be effective as a dynamic force (in the intellectual world) and precisely the unfulfilled ideals prove to be the most invincible.
Stefan Zweig
#81. If you are going to sell yourself, you should at least get a good price.
Stefan Zweig
#82. Every wave, regardless of how high and forceful it crests, must eventually collapse within itself.
Stefan Zweig
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. As we grow old, we become aware that death is drawing near; his shadow falls across our path; the realities of life seem less crude than of yore, they touch our senses less intimately, and they lose much of their poignancy.
Stefan Zweig
#86. 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
#87. intelligence, its tenets those of division, regression, hatred, violence and persecution. In
Stefan Zweig
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. In medicine the use of the knife is often the kinder course.
Stefan Zweig
#91. 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
#92. soothing silence instead of an oppressive one.
Stefan Zweig
#93. All I know is that I shall be alone again. There is nothing more terrible than to be alone among human beings.
Stefan Zweig
#94. the natural animosity between those who slept and those who were stirring in the sleeping city.
Stefan Zweig
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. You don't run amok for long with impunity, you're bound to be struck down in the end ...
Stefan Zweig
#98. But society is always most cruel to those who betray its secretes, showing where it's dishonesty commits a crime against nature.
Stefan Zweig
#99. For tradition also and always means inhibition.
Stefan Zweig
#100. Never can the innate power of a work be hidden or locked away. A work of art can be forgotten by time; it can be forbidden and rejected but the elemental will always prevail over the ephemeral.
Stefan Zweig
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