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

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
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Writer
Vienna
Austria
Energy
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History
Remote
Often
Centuries
Persons
Decide
Person
Presence
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Mind
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More quotes by 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.
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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.
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Why is it that the stupidest people are always the most good-natured?
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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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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.
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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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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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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.
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A word is nothing unless it has values and an atmosphere, unless you grasp its historical significance.
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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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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.
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He who studies without passion will never become anything more than a pedant.
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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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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
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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.
Stefan Zweig
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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.
Stefan Zweig
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It is better to be the servant of God than the ruler of men.
Stefan Zweig
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I am not fooling myself with dreams of immortality, know how relative all literature is, don't have any faith in mankind, derive enjoyment from too few things. Sometimes these crises give birth to something worth while, sometimes they simply plunge one deeper into depression, but, of course, it is all part of the same thing.
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Ah, how fatefully swift is the move from one feeling to another.
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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.
Stefan Zweig