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A word is nothing unless it has values and an atmosphere, unless you grasp its historical significance.

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
Historical
Unless
Word
Values
Nothing
Grasp
Significance
Atmosphere

More quotes by Stefan Zweig

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Whilst all the land was ringed with bristling arms And flames laid waste our world, All that was left me was a little garden And thou within it, my beloved, my comrade.
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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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.
Stefan Zweig
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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.
Stefan Zweig
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It would be foolhardy to count on the conscience of the world.
Stefan Zweig
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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
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Dostoevsky was the first to reveal to us this teeming multiplicity of emotions, this complexity of our spiritual universe.
Stefan Zweig
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For the more a man limits himself, the nearer he is on the other hand to what is limitless it is precisely those who are apparently aloof from the world who build for themselves a remarkable and thoroughly individual world in miniature, using their own special equipment, termit-like.
Stefan Zweig
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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.
Stefan Zweig
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Why is it that the stupidest people are always the most good-natured?
Stefan Zweig
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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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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
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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.
Stefan Zweig
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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.
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.
Stefan Zweig
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And fate? No one alive has ever escaped it, neither brave man nor coward, I tell you-- it's born with us the day that we are born.
Stefan Zweig
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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
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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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The Battle of Waterloo is a work of art with tension and drama with its unceasing change from hope to fear and back again, changewhich suddenly dissolves into a moment of extreme catastrophe, a model tragedy because the fate of Europe was determined within this individual fate.
Stefan Zweig
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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.
Stefan Zweig