Top 200 Stefan Zweig Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Happy people are poor psychologists.”

— Stefan Zweig

2. “One can run away from anything but oneself.”

— Stefan Zweig

3. “No guilt is forgotten so long as the conscience still knows of it.”

— Stefan Zweig

4. “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

5. “The works of the great artists are silent books of eternal truths.”

— Stefan Zweig

6. “Only the person who has experienced light and darkness, war and peace, rise and fall, only that person has truly experienced life.”

— Stefan Zweig

7. “All office workers are afraid of being late for work.”

— Stefan Zweig

8. “As we grow old, we become aware that death is drawing near; his shadow falls across our path; the realities of life seem less crude than of yore, they touch our senses less intimately, and they lose much of their poignancy.”

— Stefan Zweig

9. “The instinct for self-deception in human beings makes them try to banish from their minds dangers of which at bottom they are perfectly aware by declaring them non-existent.”

— Stefan Zweig

10. “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

11. “To grow old means to be rid of anxieties about the past.”

— Stefan Zweig

Featured in: Anxiety Quotes

12. “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

13. “Names have a mysterious transforming power. Like a ring on a finger, a name may at first seem merely accidental, committing you to nothing; but before you realize its magical power, it’s gotten under your skin, become part of you and your destiny.”

— Stefan Zweig

14. “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

15. “Truth to tell, we are all criminals if we remain silent...”

— Stefan Zweig

16. “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

17. “How terrible this darkness was, how bewildering, and yet mysteriously beautiful!”

— Stefan Zweig

18. “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

19. “There is nothing more vindictive, nothing more underhanded, than a little world that would like to be a big one.”

— Stefan Zweig

20. “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

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

21. “One must be convinced to convince, to have enthusiasm to stimulate the others.”

— Stefan Zweig

22. “Every wave, regardless of how high and forceful it crests, must eventually collapse within itself.”

— Stefan Zweig

23. “And fate? No one alive has ever escaped it, neither brave man nor coward, I tell you – it’s born with us the day that we are born.”

— Stefan Zweig

24. “Life is futile unless it be directed towards a definite goal.”

— Stefan Zweig

25. “Something indefinite is always worse than something definite, a strong fear that doesn’t last very long is easier than one that’s nebulous but doesn’t go away.”

— Stefan Zweig

Featured in: Strong Quotes

26. “It is the way of youth that each fresh piece of knowledge of life should go to its head, and that once uplifted by an emotion it can never have enough of it.”

— Stefan Zweig

27. “Memory is so corrupt that you remember only what you want to; if you want to forget about something, slowly but surely you do.”

— Stefan Zweig

28. “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

29. “All I know is that I shall be alone again. There is nothing more terrible than to be alone among human beings.”

— Stefan Zweig

30. “Nothing on earth puts more pressure on the human mind than nothing.”

— Stefan Zweig

31. “There is no sense to a sacrifice after you come to feel that it is a sacrifice.”

— Stefan Zweig

32. “He who studies without passion will never become anything more than a pedant.”

— Stefan Zweig

33. “Alt werden heisst nichts anderes, als keine Angst mehr haben vor der Vergangenheit.”

— Stefan Zweig

34. “The free, independent spirit who commits himself to no dogma and will not decide in favor of any party has no homestead on earth.”

— Stefan Zweig

35. “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

36. “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?”

— Stefan Zweig

37. “Once shame touches your being at any point, even the most distant nerve is implicated, whether you know it or not; any fleeting encounter or random thought will rake up the anguish and add to it.”

— Stefan Zweig

38. “It is a law of life that human beings, even the geniuses among them, do not pride themselves on their actual achievements but thatthey want to impress others, want to be admired and respected because of things of much lower import and value.”

— Stefan Zweig

39. “Long-protracted suffering is apt to exhaust not only the invalid, but the compassion of others; violent emotions cannot be prolonged endlessly.”

— Stefan Zweig

40. “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

41. “The union of opposites, in so far as they are really complementary, always results in the most perfect harmony; and the seemingly incongruous is often the most natural.”

— Stefan Zweig

42. “When they are preparing for war, those who rule by force speak most copiously about peace until they have completed the mobilization process.”

— Stefan Zweig

43. “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

44. “Dostoevsky was the first to reveal to us this teeming multiplicity of emotions, this complexity of our spiritual universe.”

— Stefan Zweig

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

45. “For the more a man limits himself, the nearer he is on the other hand to what is limitless.”

— Stefan Zweig

46. “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

47. “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

48. “Today, for a Jew who writes in the German language, it is totally impossible to make a living. In no group do I see as much misery, disappointment, desperation and hopelessness as in Jewish writers who write in German.”

— Stefan Zweig

49. “Immanuel Kant lived with knowledge as with his lawfully wedded wife, slept with it in the same intellectual bed for forty years and begot an entire German race of philosophical systems.”

— Stefan Zweig

50. “It is better to pay tribute of gold to the enemy than tribute of blood in war.”

— Stefan Zweig