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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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Long-protracted suffering is apt to exhaust not only the invalid, but the compassion of others violent emotions cannot be prolonged endlessly.
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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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A word is nothing unless it has values and an atmosphere, unless you grasp its historical significance.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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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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It would be foolhardy to count on the conscience of the world.
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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.
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There is no sense to a sacrifice after you come to feel that it is a sacrifice.
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The idea of Jewish unity, of a plan, an organization, unfortunately exists only in the brains of Hitler and Streicher.
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It is better to be the servant of God than the ruler of men.
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The dressmaker doesn't have problems unless the dress has to hide rather than reveal.
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Ah, how fatefully swift is the move from one feeling to another.
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In this instant, shaken to her very depths, this ecstatic human being has a first inkling that the soul is made of stuff so mysteriously elastic that a single event can make it big enough to contain the infinite.
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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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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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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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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