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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.

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
Moments
Battle
Extremes
Art
Europe
Model
Change
Within
Suddenly
Unceasing
Back
Moment
Determined
Waterloo
Work
Hope
Tragedy
Dissolves
Individual
Models
Catastrophe
History
Drama
Extreme
Fear
Fate
Tension

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Why is it that the stupidest people are always the most good-natured?
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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 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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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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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.
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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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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.
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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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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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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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One can run away from anything but oneself.
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Only ambition is fired by the coincidences of success and easy accomplishment.
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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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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.
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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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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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The subject of a rumor is always the last to hear it.
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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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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.
Stefan Zweig