Stefan Zweig Quotes

107 Sourced Quotes

The only respect in which man is superior to animals is that he can die when he wants to, not just when he has to. Maybe it's the one freedom you can always count on — the freedom to throw your life away.

Stefan Zweig
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. Justice in some mysterious way makes up for violence.

Stefan Zweig
The organic fundamental error of humanism was that it desired to educate the common people (on whom it looked down) from its lofty stance instead of trying to understand them and to learn from them.

Stefan Zweig
Most people have very little imagination. They are hardly moved by anything which does not directly touch them, which does not positively hammer its message upon their senses; but even a trifle, should it happen under their very eyes, and within the immediate range of their feelings, will instantly kindle in them a disproportionate amount of passion. We may say that the rarity of their interest is compensated by an inappropriate and exaggerated vehemence when their interest is at last aroused.

Stefan Zweig
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.

Stefan Zweig
Gratitude fills us with rejoicing, for it so rarely finds frank expression; delicacy of feeling warms our hearts.

Stefan Zweig
It is a law of life that human beings, even the geniuses among them, do not pride themselves on their actual achievements but that they want to impress others, want to be admired and respected because of things of much lower import and value.

Stefan Zweig
Fear is a distorting mirror in which anything can appear as a caricature of itself, stretched to terrible proportions; once inflamed, the imagination pursues the craziest and most unlikely possibilities. What is most absurd suddenly seems the most probable.

Stefan Zweig
All office workers are afraid of being late for work.

Stefan Zweig
There is no understanding of the past without personal experience, without reliving it in imagination. A word is nothing unless it has values and an atmosphere, unless you grasp its historical significance.

Stefan Zweig
All my life I have been passionately interested in monomaniacs of any kind, people carried away by a single idea. The more one limits oneself, the closer one is to the infinite; these people, as unworldly as they seem, burrow like termites into their own particular material to construct, in miniature, a strange and utterly individual image of the world.

Stefan Zweig
Hairdressers are professional gossips; when only the hands are busy, the tongue is seldom still.

Stefan Zweig
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
My father was a schoolmaster in a little North German town, and for the very reason that at home culture was a means of livelihood, I detested learning and literature from childhood onwards. That is nature's way. In pursuance of her mysterious design to safeguard the creative faculty, she is apt to make children scorn their father's bent. She does not want to encourage an easy, effortless acceptance of a heritage, a mere handing down of acquisitions from one generation to the next. She sows the seeds of discord, and will only allow children to follow in their parent's footsteps after they have made laborious but fruitful detours.

Stefan Zweig
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
And I said to myself: From now on help anyone and everyone so far as it lies within your power. Cease to be apathetic, indifferent! Exalt yourself by devoting yourself to others, enrich yourself by making everyone's destiny your own, by enduring and understanding every facet of human suffering through your pity. And my heart, astonished at its own workings, quivered with gratitude to the sick girl whom I had hurt unwittingly and who, through her suffering, had taught me the creative magic of pity.

Stefan Zweig
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
The avaricious are thrifty with time as well as money.

Stefan Zweig
All I know is that I shall be alone again. There is nothing more terrible than to be alone among human beings.

Stefan Zweig
Adultery is in most cases a theft in the dark. At such moments almost every woman betrays her husband's innermost secrets; becomes a Delilah who discloses to a stranger, discloses to her lover, the mysteries of her husband's strength or weakness. What seems to me treason is, not that women give themselves, but that a woman is prone, when she does so, to justify herself to herself by uncovering her husband's nakedness, exposing it to the inquisitive and scornful gaze of a stranger.

Stefan Zweig
All the pale horses of the apocalypse have stormed through my life, revolution, starvation, devaluation of currency and terror, epidemics, emigration; I have seen the great ideologies of the masses grow and spread out before my eyes. Fascism in Italy, National Socialism in Germany, Bolshevism in Russia, and, above all, that archpestilence, nationalism, which poisoned our flourishing European culture.

Stefan Zweig
Nothing makes you madder than wanting to defend yourself against something you can't even get hold of, something the human race is doing to you, but still there's nobody you can grab by the throat.

Stefan Zweig
But 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.

Stefan Zweig
The union of opposites, in so far as they are really complementary, always results in the most perfect harmony; and the seemingly incongruous is often the most natural.

Stefan Zweig
When a dozen men are harnessed to the same cart, one always pulls harder than the others, and when it's a question of promotion and seniority, it's easy to tread on the toes of the man ahead of you. At every word one utters one has to be on one's guard; one's never quite sure whether it isn't going to arouse the disapproval of the big bugs; there's always a storm in the offing.

Stefan Zweig
The history of the world will not tolerate intruders; it chooses its own heroes and implacably dismisses those not summoned to that rank, however hard they may try; someone who has fallen off the carriage of fate as it goes along will never catch up with it again.

Stefan Zweig
He who studies without passion will never become anything more than a pedant. We must approach knowledge from the inside; inspired by passion.

Stefan Zweig
Gratitude is a rare frame of mind; and those who are grateful can seldom find a way to express what they feel. They are overwhelmed by silence; are shamefaced; and, sometimes, actually try to hide their feelings.

Stefan Zweig
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
No one would ever believe how hard it is to be really alone in a city of millions when you don't have money.

Stefan Zweig