Stefan Zweig Quotes - Page 5

Quotes about:

Only the rare expands our minds, only as we shudder in the face of a new force do our feelings increase. Therefore the extraordinary is always the measure of all greatness. And the creative element always remains the value superior to all others and the mind superior to our minds.

Stefan Zweig

Creativity, Greatness, Creative

6 Copy quote
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

Unhappy, Vienna, Brutality

7 Copy quote
Even from the abyss of horror in which we try to feel our way today, half-blind, our hearts distraught and shattered, I look up again and again to the ancient constellations that shone on my childhood, comforting myself with the inherited confidence that, some day, this relapse will appear only an interval in the eternal rhythm of progress onward and upward.

Stefan Zweig

Heart, Onward And Upward, Childhood

Stefan Zweig, Wes Anderson (2014). “The Society of the Crossed Keys”, p.20, Pushkin Press

18 Copy quote
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

8 Copy quote
With Nietzsche, the black pirates' flag appears for the first time on the high sea of German knowledge. (He is) a different man, from a different race, (his,) a new kind of heroism, philosophywith bellicose weapons and armor.

Stefan Zweig

Philosophical, Knowledge, Men

6 Copy quote
Only a numskull is pleased at being a so-called "success" with women, only a dunderhead is puffed up by it. A real man is much more likely to be dismayed at realizing that a woman has lost her heart to him when he can't reciprocate her feelings.

Stefan Zweig

Real, Women, Heart

"Beware of Pity". Book by Stefan Zweig, 1939.

4 Copy quote
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, Two

10 Copy quote
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

Heart, Suffering, Depth

Stefan Zweig (1929). “Jeremiah: A Drama in Nine Scenes”, p.463, Library of Alexandria

7 Copy quote
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

4 Copy quote
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

Stefan Zweig (2009). “The Post Office Girl”, Sort of

9 Copy quote
There is nothing that so raises a young man's self-esteem, that so contributes to the formation of his character as for him to find himself unexpectedly confronted with a task which he has to accomplish entirely on his own initiative and by his own efforts.

Stefan Zweig

Self Esteem, Character, Men

"Beware of Pity". Book by Stefan Zweig, 1939.

4 Copy quote
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

Sweet, Firsts, Rich

Stefan Zweig (2008). “Burning Secret”, p.76, Pushkin Press

4 Copy quote
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

Stefan Zweig, Friderike Maria Burger Winternitz Zweig, Henry G. Alsberg (1954). “Stefan and Friderike Zweig: their correspondence, 1912-1942”

4 Copy quote
Now I am discovering the world once more. England has widened my horizon.

Stefan Zweig

Horizon, World, England

13 Copy quote
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, Intellectual

4 Copy quote
Never is a historic deed already completed when it is done but always only when it is handed down to posterity. What we call "history" by no means represents the sum total of all significant deeds.... World historyonly comprises that tiny lighted sector which chanced to be placed in the spotlight by poetic or scholarly depictions.

Stefan Zweig

Mean, History, Done

4 Copy quote
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

Understanding, Suffering, Abnormal

"Beware of Pity". Book by Stefan Zweig, 1939.

4 Copy quote
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

Horse, Eye, Epidemics

"The World of Yesterday: Memories of a European". Book by Stefan Zweig, transl. by Marion Sonnenfeld, p. 10, 1942.

19 Copy quote
But nothing is better than a truth which appears not to have the semblance of truth. There is always something incomprehensible about the great heroic deeds performed by humanity because they rise so far beyond the mediocre measure of mere mortals; but it is always only because of the incredible feats that human beings have accomplished that humanity recovers its faith in itself.

Stefan Zweig

Truth, Heroic Deeds, Humanity

5 Copy quote
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, Long Ago, Order

Stefan Zweig (2009). “The World of Yesterday: Memoirs of a European”, p.12, Pushkin Press

9 Copy quote
Dostoevsky was the first to reveal to us this teeming multiplicity of emotions, this complexity of our spiritual universe.

Stefan Zweig

Spiritual, Firsts, Emotion

10 Copy quote
The sight of a wedding always has a disturbing effect on young girls; at such moments a mysterious sense of solidarity with their own sex takes possession of them.

Stefan Zweig

Girl, Sex, Sight

"Beware of Pity". Book by Stefan Zweig, 1939.

4 Copy quote
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

Depression, Dream, Giving

Stefan Zweig, Friderike Maria Burger Winternitz Zweig (1954). “Stefan and Friderike Zweig: their correspondence, 1912-1942”

4 Copy quote
Pain is a coward. He flees when faced by the irresistible power of the will-to-live, which is more strongly rooted in the flesh than the intensest passion is rooted in the spirit.

Stefan Zweig

Pain, Passion, Coward

Stefan Zweig (1955). “Stories and Legends”

4 Copy quote
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

Law, Movement, Recognition

Stefan Zweig (1943). “The World of Yesterday: An Autobiography”, N.Y. : Viking Press

4 Copy quote

You May Also Like:

Rainer Maria Rilke

Arthur Schnitzler

Stefan Zweig

Follow

Born: November 28, 1881
Died: February 22, 1942
Occupation: Novelist
Cite this Page: Citation

Popular Topics