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But don't despise error. When touched by genius, when led by chance, the most superior truth can come into being from even the most foolish error. The important inventions which have been brought about in every realm of science from false hypotheses number in the hundreds, indeed in the thousands.

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
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Playwright
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Vienna
Austria
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More quotes by Stefan Zweig

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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.
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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.
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He who studies without passion will never become anything more than a pedant.
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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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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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It would be foolhardy to count on the conscience of the world.
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Ah, how fatefully swift is the move from one feeling to another.
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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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All office workers are afraid of being late for work.
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Through suffering we have endured the assaults of time reverses have ever been our beginning and out of the depths God has gathered us to his heart.
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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.
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I hadn't had a book in my hands for four months, and the mere idea of a book where I could see words printed one after another, lines, pages, leaves, a book in which I could pursue new, different, fresh thoughts to divert me, could take them into my brain, had something both intoxicating and stupefying about it.
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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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The subject of a rumor is always the last to hear 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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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.
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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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Every wave, regardless of how high and forceful it crests, must eventually collapse within itself.
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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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Only that which points the human spirit beyond its own limitations into what is universally human gives the individual strength superior to his own. Only in suprahuman demands which can hardly be fulfilled do human beings and peoples feel their true and sacred measure.
Stefan Zweig