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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

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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
Look
Misanthropic
Firsts
Keen
Looks
Acquired
First
Innocence
Things
Sees
People
Blessing
Eye
Able
Diagnostic

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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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On the whole, more men had perhaps escaped into the war than from it.
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Being sent to bed is a terrible command to all children, because it means the most public possible humiliation in front of adults, the confession that they bear the stigma of childhood, of being small and having a child's need for sleep.
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Whatever a woman's reason may say, her feelings tell her the truth.
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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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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.
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He who has been impoverished for a long timewho has long stood before the door of the mighty in darkness and begged for alms,has filled his heart with bitterness so that it resembles a sponge full of gall he knows about the injustice and folly of all human action and sometimes his lips tremble with rage and a stifled scream.
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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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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.
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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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The subject of a rumor is always the last to hear it.
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States of profound happiness, like all other forms of intoxication, are apt to befuddle the wits intense enjoyment of the present always makes one forget the past.
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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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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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Never can the innate power of a work be hidden or locked away. A work of art can be forgotten by time it can be forbidden and rejected but the elemental will always prevail over the ephemeral.
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.
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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.
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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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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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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