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Stefan Zweig

96 quotes

“Gratitude is a rare frame of mind; and those who are grateful can seldom find a way to express what they feel. They are overwhelmed by silence; are shamefaced; and, sometimes, actually try to hide their feelings.”
Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) said by 1942 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Gratitude fills us with rejoicing, for it so rarely finds frank expression; delicacy of feeling warms our hearts.”
Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) said by 1942 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Whatever a woman's reason may say, her feelings tell her the truth.”
Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) said by 1942 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1881–1942) said by 1942 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1881–1942) said by 1942 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To grow old means to be rid of anxieties about the past.”
Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) said by 1942 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We live through myriads of seconds, but there is only one second among all these myriads which brings our whole inner world to the boil; the second in which, as Stendhal described, there suddenly takes place a crystallization in the supersaturated blood; a magical second like that of procreation, and, like it, hidden in the warm interior of one's own body, invisible, intangible, impalpable, a unique experience of mystery. No algebra of the soul can calculate it; no alchemy can divine it. Usually, even for ourselves, it remains unsearchable.”
Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) said by 1942 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is no understanding of the past without personal experience, without reliving it in imagination. A word is nothing unless it has values and an atmosphere, unless you grasp its historical significance.”
Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) said by 1942 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He who studies without passion will never become anything more than a pedant. We must approach knowledge from the inside; inspired by passion.”
Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) said by 1942 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To the young, what can be more disturbing, what more unsettling and tantalizing, than the play of vague suspicions? The fancy, ceasing to wander in the void, concentrates upon a definite aim, and luxuriates in the febrile pleasures of the chase.”
Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) said by 1942 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Youth is always right. Those who follow the counsels of youth are wise.”
Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) said by 1942 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Adultery is in most cases a theft in the dark. At such moments almost every woman betrays her husband's innermost secrets; becomes a Delilah who discloses to a stranger, discloses to her lover, the mysteries of her husband's strength or weakness. What seems to me treason is, not that women give themselves, but that a woman is prone, when she does so, to justify herself to herself by uncovering her husband's nakedness, exposing it to the inquisitive and scornful gaze of a stranger.”
Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) said by 1942 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1881–1942) said by 1942 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All office workers are afraid of being late for work.”
Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) said by 1942 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The dressmaker doesn't have problems unless the dress has to hide rather than reveal.”
Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) said by 1942 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the end one needs forbearance to get by in this world.”
Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) said by 1942 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The soul is made of stuff so mysteriously elastic that a single event can make it big enough to contain the infinite.”
Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) said by 1942 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He looked at her again, now with the vague abject shyness that older men often have with young women, as though asking their indulgence for no longer being young.”
Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) said by 1942 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1881–1942) said by 1942 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1881–1942) said by 1942 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Someone who's on top of the world isn't much of an observer: happy people are poor psychologists. But someone who's troubled about something is on the alert. The perceived threat sharpens his senses - he takes in more than he usually does.”
Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) said by 1942 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Hairdressers are professional gossips; when only the hands are busy, the tongue is seldom still.”
Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) said by 1942 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Malice is always lucky.”
Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) said by 1942 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The subject of a rumor is always the last to hear it.”
Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) said by 1942 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is nothing more vindictive, nothing more underhanded, than a little world that would like to be a big one.”
Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) said by 1942 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1881–1942) said by 1942 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1881–1942) said by 1942 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There's an inherent limit to the stress that any material can bear. Water has its boiling point, metals their melting points. The elements of the spirit behave the same way. Happiness can reach a pitch so great that any further happiness can't be felt. Pain, despair, humiliation, disgust, and fear are no different. Once the vessel is full, the world can't add to it.”
Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) said by 1942 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nothing makes you madder than wanting to defend yourself against something you can't even get hold of, something the human race is doing to you, but still there's nobody you can grab by the throat.”
Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) said by 1942 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1881–1942) said by 1942 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The only respect in which man is superior to animals is that he can die when he wants to, not just when he has to. Maybe it's the one freedom you can always count on — the freedom to throw your life away.”
Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) said by 1942 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No one would ever believe how hard it is to be really alone in a city of millions when you don't have money.”
Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) said by 1942 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have loved you ever since. I know full well that you are used to hearing women say that they love you. But I am sure that no one else has ever loved you so lavishly, with such doglike fidelity, with such devotion, as I did and do. Nothing can equal the unnoticed love of a child. It is hopeless and subservient; it is patient and passionate; it is something which the covetous love of a grown woman, the love that is unconsciously exacting, can never be. Non but lonely children can cherish such a passion. The others will squander their feelings in companionship, will dissipate them in confidential talks. They have heard and read much of love, and they know that it comes to all. They play with it like a toy; they flaunt it as a boy flaunts his first cigarette. But I had no confidant; I had been neither taught nor warned; I was inexperience and unsuspecting.”
Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) said by 1942 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. During the war practically the only courage I ran across was mass courage, the courage that comes of being one of a herd, and anyone who examines this phenomenon more closely will find it to be compounded of some very strange elements: a great deal of vanity, a great deal of fear — yes, fear of staying behind, fear of being sneered at fear of independent action, and fear, above all, of taking up a stand against the mass enthusiasm of one's fellows.”
Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) said by 1942 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is only at first that pity, like morphine, is a solace to the invalid, a remedy, a drug, but unless you know the correct dosage and when to stop, it becomes a virulent poison. The first few injections do good, they soothe, they deaden the pain. But the devil of it is that the organism, the body, just like the soul, has an uncanny capacity for adaptation. Just as the nervous system cries out for more and more morphine, so do the emotions cry out for more and more pity, in the end more than one can give. Inevitably there comes a moment when one has to say 'no', and then one must not mind the other person's hating one more for this ultimate refusal than if one had never helped him at all. Yes, my dear Lieutenant, one has got to keep one's pity properly in check, or it does far more harm than any amount of indifference — we doctors know that, and so do judges and myrmidons of the law and pawn-brokers; if they were all to give way to their pity, this world of ours would stand still - a dangerous thing pity, a dangerous thing!”
Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) said by 1942 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In my youth and comparative inexperience I had always regarded the yearning and pangs of love as the worst torture that could afflict the human heart. At this moment, however, I began to realize that there was another and perhaps grimmer torture than that of longing and desiring: that of being loved against one's will and of being unable to defend oneself against the urgency of another's passion; of seeing another human being seared by the flame of her desire and of having to look impotently, lacking the power, the capacity, the strength to pluck her from the flames. He who is himself crossed in love is able from time to time to master his passion, for he is not the creature but the creator of his own misery; and if a lover is unable to control his passim, he at least knows that he is himself to blame for his sufferings.”
Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) said by 1942 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Our decisions are to a much greater extent dependent on our desire to conform to the standards of our class and environment than we are inclined to admit. A considerable proportion of our reasoning is merely an automatic function, so to speak, of influences and impressions which have become part of us, and anyone who has been brought up from childhood in the stern school of military discipline is particularly apt to succumb to the hypnotic and compulsive force exercised by an order of word of command; a force which is logically entirely incomprehensible and which irresistibly undermines his will. In the straitjacket of a uniform, even though fully aware of their absurdity, an officer will carry out his instructions lie a sleep-walker, unresistingly and almost unconsciously.”
Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) said by 1942 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is not the healthy, the confident, the proud, the joyous, the happy, that one must love - they have no need of one's love! Arrogant and indifferent, they accept love only as homage that is theirs to command, as their due. The devotion of another is to them a mere embellishment, an ornament for the hair, a bracelet on the arm, not the whole meaning and bliss of their lives. Only those with whom life has dealt hardly, the wretched, the slighted, the uncertain, the unlovely, the humiliated, could really be helped by love. He who devotes his life to them atones to them for what life has taken from them. They alone know how to love and be loved as one should love - gratefully and humbly.”
Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) said by 1942 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My father was a schoolmaster in a little North German town, and for the very reason that at home culture was a means of livelihood, I detested learning and literature from childhood onwards. That is nature's way. In pursuance of her mysterious design to safeguard the creative faculty, she is apt to make children scorn their father's bent. She does not want to encourage an easy, effortless acceptance of a heritage, a mere handing down of acquisitions from one generation to the next. She sows the seeds of discord, and will only allow children to follow in their parent's footsteps after they have made laborious but fruitful detours.”
Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) said by 1942 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nothing moves young people so much as to witness a sublime and virile gloom. Michelangelo's thinker staring down into the abyss of his own thoughts, Beethoven's poignantly drawn lips; these tragical masks of universal suffering touch the crude emotions of youth far more than Mozart's silver melodies or the crystalline light that radiates from Leonardo's figures. Being itself beauty, youth has no need of transfiguration. In the superabundance of its vital forces, it is allured by the tragical, and in its inexperience, is prone to accept the embraces of melancholy. That, too, is why youth is always ready for danger, and ever willing to extend a brotherly hand towards mental pain.”
Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) said by 1942 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“England rose before our eyes; the island girdled by the stormy waters in which all the continents of the globe are laved. In that sea-girt isle, the ocean holds sway. The cold and clear gaze of the watery element is reflected in the eyes of the inhabitants. Every one of the dwellers in that land is one of the sea-folk, is himself an island. The storms and dangers of the sea have left their mark, and live on to-day in these English, whose ancestors for centuries were vikings and sea-raiders. Now peace broods over the isle. But the dwellers therein, used to storms, crave for the lie of the sea with its daily perils. When it is denied them, they create its stormy likeness for themselves in blood-sports. They build wooden lists for beast-baiting. The voluptuous horror of the spectators is stimulated in bestial fashion by watching cock-fights or by looking on while bears are torn by dogs. Soon here is a demand for a loftier tension of the senses, such as can be derived from the spectacle of heroic human conflicts. Thus there grows out of the medieval religious mysteries, the great drama of human effort, in which the adventures and the voyages of earlier days are depicted - voyages no longer sailed on a real sea, but on the inner sea of man's feelings. A new infinity, another ocean with spring tides of passion and an uprush of the spirit; a determination to steer a course through the waters on which heretofore they were driven at the mercy of winds and waves - such are the new longings of the late-born and vigorous Anglo-Saxon race. Such is the origin of the Elizabethan drama.”
Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) said by 1942 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When a man has a passion for a woman, and when that passion is of such a nature that he regards her with reverent admiration as an image of purity, none the less, in the unconscious, his desires turn towards bodily fulfillment, none the less the goal of physical possession is prefigured in the deepest recesses of his imagination. But when the passion is confined to the realm of the spirit, and, in that realm, is a man's passion for a man, how can it seek fulfillment? Unrestingly, the fancy wanders over the honored form, flaming up again and again to fresh ecstasy, but never finding repose in a last surrender. It flows on without pause in a current that can never empty the reservoir from which it comes. This passion is insatiable, as the spirit invariably is.”
Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) said by 1942 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ever since the war he's had a low opinion of people and of nations, they're selfish, all of them, without the imagination to see the injustices they're perpetrating. The idealism of his youth, a belief in the moral mission of mankind and the enlightened spirit of the white race that he took from the lectures of John Stuart Mill and his followers, was buried once and for all in the bloody mire of Ypres and the chalk quarry at Soissons where his son met his death. Politics disgusts him, the cool conviviality of the club and the showy self-congratulation of the public banquet repel him; since the death of his son he's avoided making new acquaintances. His own generation's sour unwillingness to recognize the truth and its inability to adapt to the postwar era anger him, as does the younger generation's smart-alecky thoughtlessness. But with this girl he's regained belief, a vague devout gratitude for the mere existence of youth; in her presence he sees that one generation's painfully acquired mistrust of life is fortunately neither understood nor credited by the next, and that each new wave of youth is a new beginning.”
Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) said by 1942 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You're going to tell me that poverty's nothing to be ashamed of. It's not true, though. If you can't hide it, then it is something to be ashamed of. There's nothing you can do, you're ashamed just the same, the way you're ashamed when you leave a spot on somebody's table. No matter if it's deserved or not, honorable or not, poverty stinks. Yes, stinks, stinks like a ground-floor room off an airshaft, or clothes that need changing. You smell it yourself, as though you were made of sewage. It can't be wiped away. It doesn't help to put on a new hat, any more than rinsing your mouth helps when you're belching your guts out. It's around you and on you and everyone who brushes up against you or looks at you knows it. I know the way women look down on you when you're down at heels. I know it's embarrassing for other people, but the hell with that, it's a lot more embarrassing when it's you. You can't get out of it, you can't get past it, the best thing to do is get plastered, and here" (he reached for his glass and drained it in a deliberately uncouth gulp) "here's the great social problem, here's why the 'lower classes' indulge in alcohol so much more - that problem that countesses and matrons in women's groups rack their brains over at tea. For those few minutes, those few hours, you forget you're an affront to other and to yourself. It's no great distinction to be seen in the company of someone dressed lie this, I know, but it's no fun for me either.”
Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) said by 1942 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The vast power of money, mighty when you have it and even mightier when you don't, with its divine gift of freedom and the demonic fury it unleashes on those forced to do without it — they felt this as never before and were filled with bitter rage when, in the dark of the early morning, they saw the brightly lit windows and knew that those glowing gold curtains gave shelter and freedom to hundreds of thousands of people, men with women they desired, while they themselves were homeless, plodding blindly through the streets, through the rain; it was cruel as only the sea could be cruel — the sea in which a person can die of thirst.”
Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) said by 1942 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I don't have a trace of moral scruple, when it comes to the state I feel completely free. It's committed such terrible crimes against us all, against our generation, that we have a right to anything. I'm not worried about doing it damage, we'll just be recovering some damages for our entire battered generation. Who taught me how to steal, who made me do it, if not the state? Commandeering, that's the word they used during the war, or expropriating — Versailles called it reclamation. Who taught us how to cheat if not the state — how else would we know what money saved up by three generations could become worthless in a mere two weeks, that families could be swindled out of pastures, houses, and fields that had been theirs for a hundred years? Even if I kill someone, who trained me to do it? Six months on the drill field and then years at the front! We have an excellent case against the state, by God, we'll win in every court. It can never pay off its terrible debt, never give back what it took from us. Once there might have been a reason to have some qualms, back when the state was a good custodian, thrifty, decent, proper. Now that it's behaved like a hoodlum, we have the right to be hoodlums too.”
Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) said by 1942 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source