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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.

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
Knowledge
Determine
Enriches
Values
Achievement
Enhances
History
Increase
Permanently
Persons
Value
Usefulness
Person
Consciousness
Determines
Never
Humanity
Increases
Creative
Practicals
Moral
Practical

More quotes by 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.
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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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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.
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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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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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In some mysterious way, once one has gained an insight into human nature, that insight grows from day to day, and he to whom it has given to experience vicariously even one single form of earthly suffering acquires, by reason of this tragic lesson, an understanding of all its forms, even those most foreign to him, and apparently abnormal.
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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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Ah, how fatefully swift is the move from one feeling to another.
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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.
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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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On the whole, more men had perhaps escaped into the war than from it.
Stefan Zweig
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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.
Stefan Zweig
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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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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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What is noble, lyrical, tender in the upper level shown is also with the servants, scoundrels, and scamps, as in a distorting mirror. This contrast seems to me a most appealing musical theme--to show love in its noble and crude forms, romanticism and crass realism mixed as in everyday life.
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I hadn't had a book in my hands for four months, and the mere idea of a book where I could see words printed one after another, lines, pages, leaves, a book in which I could pursue new, different, fresh thoughts to divert me, could take them into my brain, had something both intoxicating and stupefying about it.
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The subject of a rumor is always the last to hear it.
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It is better to be the servant of God than the ruler of men.
Stefan Zweig
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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.
Stefan Zweig
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One can run away from anything but oneself.
Stefan Zweig