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.
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.
How terrible this darkness was, how bewildering, and yet mysteriously beautiful!
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.
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.
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.
Beware of pity.
En la vida, los destinos están casi siempre separados: quienes comprenden no son los ejecutores, y quienes actúan no comprenden.
Art can bring us consolation as individuals,” he said, “but it is powerless against reality.
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.
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.
Once more my pity had been stronger than my will.
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.
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.
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.
Nothing on earth puts more pressure on the human mind than nothing.
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.
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.
Immer sind die Instinkte wissender als unsere wachen Gedanken.
There is nothing more vindictive, nothing more underhanded, than a little world that would like to be a big one.
But spite is a wonderful thing for keeping people alive.
Soul is made of stuff so mysteriously elastic that a single event can make it big enough to contain the infinite.
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.
All office workers are afraid of being late for work.
I had an irresistible desire to make a last effort to awaken your memory.
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.
But since those days in Vienna I had been aware that Austria was lost, not yet suspecting, to be sure, how much I had lost thereby.
Yapacak, duyacak, görecek hiçbir şey yoktu, her yerde ve sürekli hiçlikle çevriliydi insan, boyuttan ve zamandan tümüyle yoksun, boşlukta.
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.
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.
Yet it may serve to show that courage is often nothing but inverted weakness.
...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.
No one would have pity on the foolish slave of his own pity.
Happiness would prevail where trees were planted.
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.
The natural animosity between those who slept and those who were stirring in the sleeping city.
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
