Stefan Zweig quotes

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

#Life #Regret #Years

Only that which points the human spirit beyond its own limitations into what is universally human gives the individual strength superior to his own. Only in suprahuman demands which can hardly be fulfilled do human beings and peoples feel their true and sacred measure.
-- Stefan Zweig

#Inspirational #Giving #Demand

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

#War #Fall #Rome

Only ambition is fired by the coincidences of success and easy accomplishment but nothing is quite as splendidly uplifting to the heart as the defeat of a human being who battles against the invincible superiority of fate. This is always the most grandiose of all tragedies, one sometimes created by a dramatist but created thousands of times by life.
-- Stefan Zweig

#Uplifting #Heart #Ambition

Time to leave now, get out of this room, go somewhere, anywhere; sharpen this feeling of happiness and freedom, stretch your limbs, fill your eyes, be awake, wider awake, vividly awake in every sense and every pore.
-- Stefan Zweig

#Eye #Feelings #Rooms

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

#Disappointment #Loneliness #Stress

For this quiet, unprepossessing, passive man who has no garden in front of his subsidised flat, books are like flowers. He loves to line them up on the shelf in multicoloured rows: he watches over each of them with an old-fashioned gardener's delight, holds them like fragile objects in his thin, bloodless hands.
-- Stefan Zweig

#Flower #Book #Men

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

#Soul #Stuff #Firsts

There's an inherent limit to the stress that any material can bear. Water has its boiling point, metals their melting points. The elements of the spirit behave the same way. Happiness can reach a pitch so great that any further happiness can't be felt. Pain, despair, humiliation, disgust, and fear are no different. Once the vessel is full, the world can't add to it.
-- Stefan Zweig

#Pain #Stress #Water

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

#Mind #Spotlight #Energy

There are two kinds of pity. One, the weak and sentimental kind, which is really no more than the heart's impatience to be rid as quickly as possible of the painful emotion aroused by the sight of another's unhappiness, that pity which is not compassion, but only an instinctive desire to fortify one's own soul agains the sufferings of another; and the other, the only one at counts, the unsentimental but creative kind, which knows what it is about and is determined to hold out, in patience and forbearance, to the very limit of its strength and even beyond.
-- Stefan Zweig

#Heart #Compassion #Sight

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

#Book #Hands #Ideas

How terrible this darkness was, how bewildering, and yet mysteriously beautiful!
-- Stefan Zweig

#Beautiful #Darkness #Terrible

No guilt is forgotten so long as the conscience still knows of it.
-- Stefan Zweig

#Long #Guilt #Forgotten

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

#Mean #Purpose #Realizing

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

#Memories #Order #Long

Every wave, regardless of how high and forceful it crests, must eventually collapse within itself.
-- Stefan Zweig

#Wave #Collapse

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

#Art #Power #Ephemeral

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

#Today #Tomorrow

The transformation of the impossible into reality is always the mark of a demonic will. The only way to recognize a military genius is by the fact that, during the war, he will mock the rules of warfare and will employ creative improvisation instead of tested methods and he will do so at the right moment.
-- Stefan Zweig

#War #Military #Creativity

When it looks at great accomplishments, the world, bent on simplifying its images, likes best to look at the dramatic, picturesquemoments experienced by its heroes.... But the no less creative years of preparation remain in the shadow.
-- Stefan Zweig

#Hero #Years #Accomplishment

One never gets to know a person's character better than by watching his behavior during decisive moments.... It is always only danger which forces the most deeply hidden strengths and abilities of a human being to come forth.
-- Stefan Zweig

#Strength #Character #Human Nature

Formerly man had only a body and a soul. Now he needs a passport as well for without it he will not be treated like a human being.
-- Stefan Zweig

#Men #Soul #Body

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

#War #Garden #Flames

Of course, in the reality of history, the Machiavellian view which glorifies the principle of violence has been able to dominate.Not the compromising conciliatory politics of humaneness, not the Erasmian, but rather the politics of vested power which firmly exploits every opportunity, politics in the sense of the "Principe," has determined the development of European history ever since.
-- Stefan Zweig

#Opportunity #Reality #Views

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

#Forever #Political #Contentment

But in the intellectual world, there is room for all opposing forces: even that which never appears victorious in the real world continues to be effective as a dynamic force (in the intellectual world) and precisely the unfulfilled ideals prove to be the most invincible.
-- Stefan Zweig

#Real #History #Victory

Against my will, I became a witness to the most terrible defeat of reason and to the most savage triumph of brutality ever chroniclednever before did a generation suffer such a moral setback after it had attained such intellectual heights.
-- Stefan Zweig

#History #Suffering #Intellectual

This is the first time in history that a war has involved the whole world, and also it may last many years more; this thought is soul-shattering for all of us as human beings. It is horrible to think that the crimes committed by this one man Hitler have these many years been destroying the lives of hundreds of thousands and millions, and one would despair entirely were it not certain that the majority, the innumerable majority which opposes him openly or secretly, will succeed in wiping out once and for all him and his.
-- Stefan Zweig

#Life #War #Men