Stefan Zweig Quotes

107 Sourced Quotes

In times of exceptional stress, nature will often give people's behavior so tragical a complexion that neither a picture nor a verbal description is competent to represent its titanic energy.

Stefan Zweig
The word 'service' comes from serving, and serving means being dependent.

Stefan Zweig
He was, like everyone of a strongly erotic disposition, twice as good, twice as much himself when he knew that women liked him, just as many actors find their most ardent vein when they sense that they have cast their spell over the audience, the breathing mass of spectators before them.

Stefan Zweig
It is never until one realizes that one means something to others that one feels there is any point or purpose in one's own existence.

Stefan Zweig
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
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
In 1938, after Austria, our universe had become accustomed to inhumanity, to lawlessness, and brutality as never in centuries before. In a former day the occurrences in unhappy Vienna alone would have been sufficient to cause international proscription, but in 1938 the world conscience was silent or merely muttered surlily before it forgot and forgave.

Stefan Zweig
It is better to pay tribute of gold to the enemy than tribute of blood in war.

Stefan Zweig
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
For the more a man restricts himself the closer he is, conversely, to infinity.

Stefan Zweig
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
It remains an irrefragable law of history that contemporaries are denied a recognition of the early beginnings of the great movements which determine their times.

Stefan Zweig
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
A first premonition of the rich variety of life had come to him; for the first time he thought he had understood the nature of human beings - they needed each other even when they appeared hostile, and it was very sweet to be loved by them.

Stefan Zweig
The greater part of our best years has been passed for our generation in these two great worldconvulsions. All will be changed after this war, which spends in one month more than nations earned before in yearsthere is no more security in our time than in those of the Reformation or the fall of Rome.

Stefan Zweig
There is no sense to a sacrifice after you come to feel that it is a sacrifice.

Stefan Zweig
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