Stefan Zweig Quotes

53 quotes in 1151 categories

• 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…
• Memory is so corrupt that you remember only what you want to; if you want to forget about something, slowly but surely you do.
• I hadn't had a book in my hands for four months, and the mere idea of a book where I could see words printed one…
• All I know is that I shall be alone again. There is nothing more terrible than to be alone among human beings.
• Whatever a woman's reason may say, her feelings tell her the truth.
• All my life I have been passionately interested in monomaniacs of any kind, people carried away by a single idea. The more one limits oneself,…
• Only ambition is fired by the coincidences of success and easy accomplishment but nothing is quite as splendidly uplifting to the heart as the defeat…
• 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…
• The idea of Jewish unity, of a plan, an organization, unfortunately exists only in the brains of Hitler and Streicher.
• When they are preparing for war, those who rule by force speak most copiously about peace until they have completed the mobilization process.
• There are two types of compassion. One - is faint-hearted and sentimental. Actually, it is nothing more than impatience of the heart, that is hurrying…
• One must be convinced to convince, to have enthusiasm to stimulate the others.
• 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…
• Often the presence of mind and energy of a person remote from the spotlight decide the course of history for centuries to come.
• 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…
• Only the misfortune of exile can provide the in-depth understanding and the overview into the realities of the world.
• Each of us, even the lowliest and most insignificant among us, was uprooted from his innermost existence by the almost constant volcanic upheavals visited upon…
• In 1938, after Austria, our universe had become accustomed to inhumanity, to lawlessness, and brutality as never in centuries before. In a former day the…
• 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.
• 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…

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