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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

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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
Remember
Something
Corrupt
Slowly
Surely
Memory
Memories
Forget

More quotes by Stefan Zweig

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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.
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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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When they are preparing for war, those who rule by force speak most copiously about peace until they have completed the mobilization process.
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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.
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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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Whatever a woman's reason may say, her feelings tell her the truth.
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Nothing whets the intelligence more than a passionate suspicion, nothing develops all the faculties of an immature mind more than a trail running away into the dark.
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Only the person who has experienced light and darkness, war and peace, rise and fall, only that person has truly experienced life.
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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.
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He who has been impoverished for a long timewho has long stood before the door of the mighty in darkness and begged for alms,has filled his heart with bitterness so that it resembles a sponge full of gall he knows about the injustice and folly of all human action and sometimes his lips tremble with rage and a stifled scream.
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On the whole, more men had perhaps escaped into the war than from it.
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Every epoch which seeks renewal first projects its ideal into a human form. In order to comprehend its own essence tangibly, the spirit of the time chooses a human being as its prototype and raising this single individual, often one upon whom it has chanced to come, far beyond his measure, the spirit enthuses itself for its own enthusiasm.
Stefan Zweig
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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.
Stefan Zweig
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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
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A human being will accept the strictest disciplinary measures with a better grace if he knows that they will fall with equal severity on his neighbor.
Stefan Zweig
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All office workers are afraid of being late for work.
Stefan Zweig
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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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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.
Stefan Zweig
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Ah, how fatefully swift is the move from one feeling to another.
Stefan Zweig
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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.
Stefan Zweig