Quote

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.

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
Full
Folly
Sponges
Action
Rage
Alms
Human
Injustice
Tremble
Humans
Lips
Resembles
Stifled
Sometimes
Door
Mighty
Gall
Heart
Filled
Bitterness
Begged
Long
Darkness
Scream
Sponge
Doors
Stood
Impoverished

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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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.
Stefan Zweig
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One only makes books in order to keep in touch with one's fellows after one has ceased to breath, and thus to defend oneself against the inexorable fate of all that lives - transitoriness and oblivion.
Stefan Zweig
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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.
Stefan Zweig
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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
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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.
Stefan Zweig
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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.
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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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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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.
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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On the whole, more men had perhaps escaped into the war than from it.
Stefan Zweig
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Ah, how fatefully swift is the move from one feeling to another.
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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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.
Stefan Zweig
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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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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.
Stefan Zweig
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All office workers are afraid of being late for work.
Stefan Zweig
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Through suffering we have endured the assaults of time reverses have ever been our beginning and out of the depths God has gathered us to his heart.
Stefan Zweig
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One can run away from anything but oneself.
Stefan Zweig