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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

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Stefan Zweig
Age: 60 †
Born: 1881
Born: November 28
Died: 1942
Died: February 22
Biographer
Essayist
Historian
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Prosaist
Translator
Writer
Vienna
Austria
Really
Forget
Memory
Preserving
Lives
Merely
Wisely
Another
Regard
Condemned
Order
Places
Deliberately
Power
Losing
Oblivion
Everything
Events
Phenomenon
Thing
Memories
Instinct
Long
Chance
Inner
Omits

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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.
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Long-protracted suffering is apt to exhaust not only the invalid, but the compassion of others violent emotions cannot be prolonged endlessly.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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One can run away from anything but oneself.
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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.
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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.
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But the creative person is subject to a different, higher law than mere national law. Whoever has to create a work, whoever has tobring about a discovery or deed which will further the cause of all of humanity, no longer has his home in his native land but rather in his work.
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All office workers are afraid of being late for work.
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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.
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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.
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He who studies without passion will never become anything more than a pedant.
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Why is it that the stupidest people are always the most good-natured?
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What is noble, lyrical, tender in the upper level shown is also with the servants, scoundrels, and scamps, as in a distorting mirror. This contrast seems to me a most appealing musical theme--to show love in its noble and crude forms, romanticism and crass realism mixed as in everyday life.
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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.
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Only ambition is fired by the coincidences of success and easy accomplishment.
Stefan Zweig