Top 147 Quotes & Sayings by Stefan Zweig

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.

Now I am discovering the world once more. England has widened my horizon.

The idea of Jewish unity, of a plan, an organization, unfortunately exists only in the brains of Hitler and Streicher.

Every wave, regardless of how high and forceful it crests, must eventually collapse within itself.

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.

Often the presence of mind and energy of a person remote from the spotlight decide the course of history for centuries to come.

The free, independent spirit who commits himself to no dogma and will not decide in favor of any party has no homestead on earth.

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.

Only the person who has experienced light and darkness, war and peace, rise and fall, only that person has truly experienced life.

When they are preparing for war, those who rule by force speak most copiously about peace until they have completed the mobilization process.

It would be foolhardy to count on the conscience of the world.

Only the misfortune of exile can provide the in-depth understanding and the overview into the realities of the world.

In history, the moments during which reason and reconciliation prevail are short and fleeting.

One must be convinced to convince, to have enthusiasm to stimulate the others.

Fate is never too generous even to its favorites. Rarely do the gods grant a mortal more than one immortal deed.

There is no sense to a sacrifice after you come to feel that it is a sacrifice.

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.

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, 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.

All I know is that I shall be alone again. There is nothing more terrible than to be alone among human beings.

Everything in life that deviates from the straight and, so to speak, normal line, makes people first curious and then indignant.

He was welcome everywhere he went, and was well-aware of his inability to tolerate solitude. He felt no inclination to be alone and avoided it as far as possible; he didn't really want to become any better acquainted with himself. He knew that if he wanted to show his talents to best advantage, he needed to strike sparks off other people to fan the flames of warmth and exuberance in his heart. On his own he was frosty, no use to himself at all, like a match left lying in its box.

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.

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.

To grow old means to be rid of anxieties about the past.

It is better to pay tribute of gold to the enemy than tribute of blood in war.

for the more a man restricts himself the closer he is, conversely, to infinity.

No guilt is forgotten so long as the conscience still knows of it.

(Brazil:) I've never beheld such a paradise. The people are enchanting and--a mercy on this earth of ours--this is the only placewhere there isn't any race question. Negroes and whites and Indians, three-quarters, oneeighth, the wonderful Mulatto and Creole women, Jews and Christians, all dwell together in a peace that passes describing. The Jewish immigrants are in seventh heaven; all of them have jobs and feel at home.

Whatever a woman's reason may say, her feelings tell her the truth.

Hairdressers are professional gossips; when only the hands are busy, the tongue is seldom still.

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.

There is nothing more vindictive, nothing more underhanded, than a little world that would like to be a big one.

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.

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.

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.

Life is futile unless it be directed towards a definite goal.

Truth to tell, we are all criminals if we remain silent.

Unless our souls had root in soil divine We could not bear earth's overwhelming strife. The fiercest pain that racks this heart of mine, Convinces me of everlasting life.

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.

We live through myriads of seconds, yet it is always one, just one, that casts our entire inner world into turmoil, the second when (as Stendhal has described it) the internal inflorescence, already steeped in every kind of fluid, condenses and crystallizes—a magical second, like the moment of generation, and like that moment concealed in the warm interior of the individual life, invisible, untouchable, beyond the reach of feeling, a secret experienced alone. No algebra of the mind can calculate it, no alchemy of premonition divine it, and it can seldom perceive itself.

There are two kinds of pity. One, the weak and sentimental kind, which is really no more than the heart's impatience to be rid as quickly as possible of the painful emotion aroused by the sight of another's unhappiness, that pity which is not compassion, but only an instinctive desire to fortify one's own soul agains the sufferings of another; and the other, the only one at counts, the unsentimental but creative kind, which knows what it is about and is determined to hold out, in patience and forbearance, to the very limit of its strength and even beyond.

Those whom fate has dealt hard knocks remain vulnerable for ever afterwards.

The transformation of the impossible into reality is always the mark of a demonic will. The only way to recognize a military genius is by the fact that, during the war, he will mock the rules of warfare and will employ creative improvisation instead of tested methods and he will do so at the right moment.

The subject of a rumor is always the last to hear it.

In their overestimation of the role of civilization, the humanists misunderstand the primary forces of the world of primitive human drives with their untamable violence. With their optimistic view of the role of culture, they (the humanists) trivialize the terrifying, hardly solvable problems of mass hatred and of the great passionate psychoses of the human race.

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.

Ah, how fatefully swift is the move from one feeling to another.

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.

He who studies without passion will never become anything more than a pedant.

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.

Happy people are poor psychologists.

If you are going to sell yourself, you should at least get a good price.

Art knows no happier moment than the opportunity to show the symmetry of an extreme, during that moment of spheric harmony when the dissonance dissolves for the blink of an eye, dissolves into a blissful harmony, when the most extreme opposites, coming together from the greatest alienation, fleetingly touch with lips of the word and of love.

The works of the great artists are silent books of eternal truths.

On the whole, more men had perhaps escaped into the war than from it.

The dressmaker doesn't have problems unless the dress has to hide rather than reveal.

Hearing, seeing and understanding each other, humanity from one end of the earth to the other now lives simultaneously, omnipresent like a god thanks to its own creative ability. And, thanks to its victory over space and time, it would now be splendidly united for all time, if it were not confused again and again by that fatal delusion which causes humankind to keep on destroying this grandiose unity and to destroy itself with the same resources which gave it power over the elements.

One can run away from anything but oneself.

Why is it that the stupidest people are always the most good-natured?

How terrible this darkness was, how bewildering, and yet mysteriously beautiful!