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Every wave, regardless of how high and forceful it crests, must eventually collapse within itself.

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
Within
Crests
Must
Every
Forceful
Collapse
Regardless
Eventually
Wave
High

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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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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.
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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.
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There is nothing more vindictive, nothing more underhanded, than a little world that would like to be a big one.
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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.
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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.
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Formerly man had only a body and a soul. Now he needs a passport as well for without it he will not be treated like a human being.
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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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Dostoevsky was the first to reveal to us this teeming multiplicity of emotions, this complexity of our spiritual universe.
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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.
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Whatever a woman's reason may say, her feelings tell her the truth.
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There is no sense to a sacrifice after you come to feel that it is a sacrifice.
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He who studies without passion will never become anything more than a pedant.
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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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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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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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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.
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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.
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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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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