A collection of famous quotes and sayings by Stefan Zweig on love, books, movies, leadership, enthusiasm, fate, world, unity, ideas, art, hopelessness and sacrifice.
Stefan Zweig was a renowned Austrian biographer, playwright, journalist, and novelist. During the 1920s and the 1930s, at the zenith of his literary career, he was regarded as one of the most illustrious writers across the globe. Some of his most popular works include, ‘Letter From an Unknown Woman,’ ‘The World of Yesterday,’ ‘The Royal Game,’ ‘Confusion of Feelings,’ ‘Amok’, ‘Twilight,’ ‘Forgotten Dreams,’ and ‘Maria Antoinette: The Portrait of an Average Woman,’ besides various others. He was also an ardent collector of manuscripts; many of his collections are kept at the ‘National Library of Israel’ and at the ‘British Library.’ We have compiled some quotes and sayings from the writings, work, thoughts, novels, plays and journals of the distinguished writer.Â
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
Only the person who has experienced light and darkness, war and peace, rise and fall, only that person has truly experienced life.
No guilt is forgotten so long as the conscience still knows of it.
Stefan Zweig
How terrible this darkness was, how bewildering, and yet mysteriously beautiful!
Stefan Zweig
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?
In chess, as a purely intellectual game, where randomness is excluded, - for someone to play against himself is absurd ...
It is as paradoxical, as attempting to jump over his own shadow.
Stefan Zweig
All I know is that I shall be alone again. There is nothing more terrible than to be alone among human beings.
Freedom is not possible without authority - otherwise it would turn into chaos and authority is not possible without freedom - otherwise it would turn into tyranny.
Stefan Zweig
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
Beware of pity.
Stefan Zweig
Art can bring us consolation as individuals,” he said, “but it is powerless against reality.
Stefan Zweig
En la vida, los destinos están casi siempre separados: quienes comprenden no son los ejecutores, y quienes actúan no comprenden.
Once a man has found himself there is nothing in this world that he can lose. And once he has understood the humanity in himself, he will understand all human beings.
We are happy when people/things conform and unhappy when they don't. People and events don't disappoint us, our models of reality do. It is my model of reality that determines my happiness or disappointments.
Stefan Zweig
Maybe everything’s not so hard, maybe life is so much easier than I thought, you just need courage, you just need to have a sense of yourself, then you’ll discover your hidden resources.
But theoretical, imagined suffering is not what distresses a man and destroys his peace of mind. Only what you have seen with pitying eyes can really shake you.
Yapacak, duyacak, görecek hiçbir ÅŸey yoktu, her yerde ve sürekli hiçlikle çevriliydi insan, boyuttan ve zamandan tümüyle yoksun, boÅŸlukta.
Stefan Zweig
But spite is a wonderful thing for keeping people alive.
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
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.
Soul is made of stuff so mysteriously elastic that a single event can make it big enough to contain the infinite.
Stefan Zweig
I realized that there was no point in denying oneself a pleasure because it was denied another, in refusing to allow oneself to be happy because someone else was unhappy.
In medicine the use of the knife is often the kinder course.
Stefan Zweig
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.
Yet it may serve to show that courage is often nothing but inverted weakness.
Stefan Zweig
...avrei dovuto sapere che i libri si fanno solo per legarsi agli uomini al di là del nostro breve respiro e difendersi così dall'inesorabile avversario di ogni vita: la caducità e l'oblio.
What a mercy, I thought, that the crippled, the maimed, those whom Fate has cheated, at least in sleep have no knowledge of the shapeliness or unshapeliness of their bodies,
Even if I had gone further than in all honesty I should have done, my lies, those lies born of pity, had made her happy; and to make a person happy could never be a crime.
On the day I lost my passport I discovered, at the age of fifty-eight, that losing one’s native land implies more than parting with a circumscribed area of soil.
Immer sind die Instinkte wissender als unsere wachen Gedanken.
Stefan Zweig
The natural animosity between those who slept and those who were stirring in the sleeping city.
Stefan Zweig
Two suitcases, in one the wardrobe, the earthly essentials, in the other- manuscripts, the spiritual supplies, then you are at home everywhere-Zweig GW Tagebuecher p. 383
