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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
Memories
Forget
Remember
Something
Corrupt
Slowly
Surely
Memory
More quotes by Stefan Zweig
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
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
The idea of Jewish unity, of a plan, an organization, unfortunately exists only in the brains of Hitler and Streicher.
Stefan Zweig
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
Something indefinite is always worse than something definite, a strong fear that doesn't last very long is easier than one that's nebulous but doesn't go away.
Stefan Zweig
A word is nothing unless it has values and an atmosphere, unless you grasp its historical significance.
Stefan Zweig
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
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
When one does another person an injustice, in some mysterious way it does one good to discover (or to persuade oneself) that the injured party has also behaved badly or unfairly in some little matter or other it is always a relief to the conscience if one can apportion some measure of guilt to the person one has betrayed.
Stefan Zweig
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.
Stefan Zweig
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.
Stefan Zweig
I had learned and written too much history not to know that the great masses always and at once respond to the force of gravity in the direction of the powers that be. I knew that the same voices which yelled Heil Schuschnigg today would thunder Heil Hitler tomorrow.
Stefan Zweig
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
Names have a mysterious transforming power. Like a ring on a finger, a name may at first seem merely accidental, committing you to nothing but before you realize its magical power, it's gotten under your skin, become part of you and your destiny.
Stefan Zweig
Only the person who has experienced light and darkness, war and peace, rise and fall, only that person has truly experienced life.
Stefan Zweig
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
On the whole, more men had perhaps escaped into the war than from it.
Stefan Zweig
States of profound happiness, like all other forms of intoxication, are apt to befuddle the wits intense enjoyment of the present always makes one forget the past.
Stefan Zweig
It would be foolhardy to count on the conscience of the world.
Stefan Zweig
The dressmaker doesn't have problems unless the dress has to hide rather than reveal.
Stefan Zweig
