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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
Means
Others
Feels
Mean
Realizes
Something
Realizing
Never
Existence
Purpose
Point

More quotes by Stefan Zweig

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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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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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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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But, in history, practical usefulness never determines the moral value of an achievement. Only the person who increases the knowledge humanity has about itself and enhances its creative consciousness permanently enriches humanity.
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Something indefinite is always worse than something definite, a strong fear that doesn't last very long is easier than one that's nebulous but doesn't go away.
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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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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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The transformation of the impossible into reality is always the mark of a demonic will. The only way to recognize a military genius is by the fact that, during the war, he will mock the rules of warfare and will employ creative improvisation instead of tested methods and he will do so at the right moment.
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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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One can run away from anything but oneself.
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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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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.
Stefan Zweig
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The subject of a rumor is always the last to hear it.
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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.
Stefan Zweig
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Ah, how fatefully swift is the move from one feeling to another.
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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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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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On the whole, more men had perhaps escaped into the war than from it.
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Besides, isn't it confoundedly easy to think you're a great man if you aren't burdened with the slightest idea that Rembrandt, Beethoven, Dante or Napoleon ever lived?
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It is the way of youth that each fresh piece of knowledge of life should go to its head, and that once uplifted by an emotion it can never have enough of it.
Stefan Zweig