Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Need
Childhood
Sent
Children
Terrible
Command
Mean
Public
Bed
Needs
Sleep
Bear
Small
Adults
Possible
Fronts
Stigma
Child
Bears
Humiliation
Means
Front
Confession

More quotes by Stefan Zweig

Image
Happy people are poor psychologists.
Stefan Zweig
Image
One can run away from anything but oneself.
Stefan Zweig
Image
Sometimes I have the feeling that you are not quite aware--and this honors you--of the historical greatness of your position, that you think too modestly about yourself. Everything you do is destined to be of historic significance. One day, your letters, your decisions, will belong to all mankind, like those of Wagner and Brahms.
Stefan Zweig
Image
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
Image
For this quiet, unprepossessing, passive man who has no garden in front of his subsidised flat, books are like flowers. He loves to line them up on the shelf in multicoloured rows: he watches over each of them with an old-fashioned gardener's delight, holds them like fragile objects in his thin, bloodless hands.
Stefan Zweig
Image
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
Image
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
Image
In some mysterious way, once one has gained an insight into human nature, that insight grows from day to day, and he to whom it has given to experience vicariously even one single form of earthly suffering acquires, by reason of this tragic lesson, an understanding of all its forms, even those most foreign to him, and apparently abnormal.
Stefan Zweig
Image
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.
Stefan Zweig
Image
It is better to be the servant of God than the ruler of men.
Stefan Zweig
Image
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.
Stefan Zweig
Image
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.
Stefan Zweig
Image
The dressmaker doesn't have problems unless the dress has to hide rather than reveal.
Stefan Zweig
Image
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
Image
It is a blessing not yet to have acquired that over-keen, diagnostic, misanthropic eye, and to be able to look at people and things trustfully when one first sees them.
Stefan Zweig
Image
There is nothing more vindictive, nothing more underhanded, than a little world that would like to be a big one.
Stefan Zweig
Image
Only ambition is fired by the coincidences of success and easy accomplishment.
Stefan Zweig
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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