Quote

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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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
Nothing
Name
Skin
Committing
First
Names
Skins
Transforming
Like
Become
Fingers
Finger
Part
Merely
Magical
Seems
Destiny
Ring
Power
Realize
Gotten
May
Seem
Rings
Firsts
Realizing
Mysterious
Accidental

More quotes by Stefan Zweig

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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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Nothing whets the intelligence more than a passionate suspicion, nothing develops all the faculties of an immature mind more than a trail running away into the dark.
Stefan Zweig
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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
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The subject of a rumor is always the last to hear it.
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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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Only ambition is fired by the coincidences of success and easy accomplishment.
Stefan Zweig
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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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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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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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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.
Stefan Zweig
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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.
Stefan Zweig
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The dressmaker doesn't have problems unless the dress has to hide rather than reveal.
Stefan Zweig
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The sight of a wedding always has a disturbing effect on young girls at such moments a mysterious sense of solidarity with their own sex takes possession of them.
Stefan Zweig
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For this quiet, unprepossessing, passive man who has no garden in front of his subsidised flat, books are like flowers. He loves to line them up on the shelf in multicoloured rows: he watches over each of them with an old-fashioned gardener's delight, holds them like fragile objects in his thin, bloodless hands.
Stefan Zweig
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Heroic ages are not and never were sentimental and those daring conquistadores who conquered entire worlds for their Spain or Portugal received lamentably little thanks from their kings.
Stefan Zweig
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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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We can't forever be spending our lives paying for political follies that never gave us anything but always took from us, and I amcontent with the narrowest metes and bounds provided I have peace and quiet for work.
Stefan Zweig
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One can run away from anything but oneself.
Stefan Zweig
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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.
Stefan Zweig
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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.
Stefan Zweig