Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Something
Literature
Crisis
Derive
Things
Faith
Birth
Plunge
Dream
Dreams
Immortality
Part
Mankind
Relative
Give
Worth
Enjoyment
Sometimes
Simply
Depression
Giving
Courses
Despair
Fooling
Thing
Course
Deeper
Crises

More quotes by Stefan Zweig

Image
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
Image
Besides, isn't it confoundedly easy to think you're a great man if you aren't burdened with the slightest idea that Rembrandt, Beethoven, Dante or Napoleon ever lived?
Stefan Zweig
Image
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.
Stefan Zweig
Image
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.
Stefan Zweig
Image
Whatever a woman's reason may say, her feelings tell her the truth.
Stefan Zweig
Image
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.
Stefan Zweig
Image
Only the person who has experienced light and darkness, war and peace, rise and fall, only that person has truly experienced life.
Stefan Zweig
Image
Why is it that the stupidest people are always the most good-natured?
Stefan Zweig
Image
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.
Stefan Zweig
Image
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.
Stefan Zweig
Image
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
Image
There is no sense to a sacrifice after you come to feel that it is a sacrifice.
Stefan Zweig
Image
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
Image
Nothing that has ever been thought and said with a clear mind and pure ethical strength is totally in vain even if it comes froma weak hand and is imperfectly formed, it inspires the ethical spirit to constantly renewed creation.
Stefan Zweig
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
Stefan Zweig
Image
Long-protracted suffering is apt to exhaust not only the invalid, but the compassion of others violent emotions cannot be prolonged endlessly.
Stefan Zweig