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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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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
Feels
Mean
Realizes
Something
Realizing
Never
Existence
Purpose
Point
Means
Others

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Ah, how fatefully swift is the move from one feeling to another.
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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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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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Every epoch which seeks renewal first projects its ideal into a human form. In order to comprehend its own essence tangibly, the spirit of the time chooses a human being as its prototype and raising this single individual, often one upon whom it has chanced to come, far beyond his measure, the spirit enthuses itself for its own enthusiasm.
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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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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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The dressmaker doesn't have problems unless the dress has to hide rather than reveal.
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Whatever a woman's reason may say, her feelings tell her the truth.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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Every wave, regardless of how high and forceful it crests, must eventually collapse within itself.
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The instinct for self-deception in human beings makes them try to banish from their minds dangers of which at bottom they are perfectly aware by declaring them non-existent.
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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.
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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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Only a numskull is pleased at being a so-called success with women, only a dunderhead is puffed up by it. A real man is much more likely to be dismayed at realizing that a woman has lost her heart to him when he can't reciprocate her feelings.
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Only ambition is fired by the coincidences of success and easy accomplishment.
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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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It is better to be the servant of God than the ruler of men.
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