Top 200 Stefan Zweig Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “The idea of Jewish unity, of a plan, an organization, unfortunately exists only in the brains of Hitler and Streicher.”

— Stefan Zweig

52. “Only the misfortune of exile can provide the in-depth understanding and the overview into the realities of the world.”

— Stefan Zweig

53. “Fate is never too generous even to its favorites. Rarely do the gods grant a mortal more than one immortal deed.”

— Stefan Zweig

54. “If you are going to sell yourself, you should at least get a good price.”

— Stefan Zweig

55. “But, in history, practical usefulness never determines the moral value of an achievement. Only the person who increases the knowledge humanity has about itself and enhances its creative consciousness permanently enriches humanity.”

— Stefan Zweig

56. “It is better to be the servant of God than the ruler of men.”

— Stefan Zweig

57. “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

58. “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

59. “Being sent to bed is a terrible command to all children, because it means the most public possible humiliation in front of adults, the confession that they bear the stigma of childhood, of being small and having a child’s need for sleep.”

— Stefan Zweig

60. “Health alone does not suffice. To be happy, to become creative, man must always be strengthened by faith in the meaning of his own existence.”

— Stefan Zweig

61. “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

62. “States of profound happiness, like all other forms of intoxication, are apt to befuddle the wits; intense enjoyment of the present always makes one forget the past.”

— Stefan Zweig

63. “Hairdressers are professional gossips; when only the hands are busy, the tongue is seldom still.”

— Stefan Zweig

64. “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

65. “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

66. “Nothing that has ever been thought and said with a clear mind and pure ethical strength is totally in vain; even if it comes froma weak hand and is imperfectly formed, it inspires the ethical spirit to constantly renewed creation.”

— Stefan Zweig

67. “It is a blessing not yet to have acquired that over-keen, diagnostic, misanthropic eye, and to be able to look at people and things trustfully when one first sees them.”

— Stefan Zweig

68. “Unless our souls had root in soil divine We could not bear earth’s overwhelming strife. The fiercest pain that racks this heart of mine, Convinces me of everlasting life.”

— Stefan Zweig

69. “A word is nothing unless it has values and an atmosphere, unless you grasp its historical significance.”

— Stefan Zweig

70. “The dressmaker doesn’t have problems unless the dress has to hide rather than reveal.”

— Stefan Zweig

71. “Everything in life that deviates from the straight and, so to speak, normal line, makes people first curious and then indignant.”

— Stefan Zweig

72. “The subject of a rumor is always the last to hear it.”

— Stefan Zweig

73. “A human being will accept the strictest disciplinary measures with a better grace if he knows that they will fall with equal severity on his neighbor.”

— Stefan Zweig

74. “In history, the moments during which reason and reconciliation prevail are short and fleeting.”

— Stefan Zweig

75. “Ah, how fatefully swift is the move from one feeling to another.”

— Stefan Zweig

76. “Confidences are always risky: a secret entrusted to a stranger make him less of one. You’ve given away something of yourself, given him the advantage.”

— Stefan Zweig

77. “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

78. “Now I am discovering the world once more. England has widened my horizon.”

— Stefan Zweig

79. “Whatever a woman’s reason may say, her feelings tell her the truth.”

— Stefan Zweig

80. “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

81. “Heroic ages are not and never were sentimental and those daring conquistadores who conquered entire worlds for their Spain or Portugal received lamentably little thanks from their kings.”

— Stefan Zweig

82. “It would be foolhardy to count on the conscience of the world.”

— Stefan Zweig

83. “For one who is having no personal experience, the passionate disquiet of others is at any rate a titillation of the nerves, like seeing a play or listening to music.”

— Stefan Zweig

84. “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

85. “On the whole, more men had perhaps escaped into the war than from it.”

— Stefan Zweig

86. “Why is it that the stupidest people are always the most good-natured?”

— Stefan Zweig

87. “Only ambition is fired by the coincidences of success and easy accomplishment.”

— Stefan Zweig

88. “Those whom fate has dealt hard knocks remain vulnerable for ever afterwards.”

— Stefan Zweig

89. “In the last resort, every shadow is also the child of light, and only those who have known the light and the dark, have seen war and peace, rise and fall, have truly lived their lives.”

— Stefan Zweig

90. “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.”

— Stefan Zweig

91. “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

92. “I will tell you the whole story of my life, and it is a life that truly began only on the day I met you. Before that, there was nothing but murky confusion into which my memory never dipped again, some kind of cellar full of dusty, cobwebbed, sombre objects and people.”

— Stefan Zweig

93. “For the first time in my life I began to realize that it is not evil and brutality, but nearly always weakness, that is to blame for the worst things that happen in this world.”

— Stefan Zweig

94. “Mr. Zweig always encouraged his friends to set down their reminiscences, not necessarily for publication but for the pleasure and benefit of their children, their families. In his opinion every life includes inner or external experiences worthy of record.”

— Stefan Zweig

95. “That... that was how I spent the day, just waiting, waiting, waiting... but waiting like a man running amok, senselessly, like an animal, with that headlong, direct persistance.”

— Stefan Zweig

96. “Books are my kingdom. And here I seek to reign as absolute lord.”

— Stefan Zweig

97. “My child died last night – and now I shall be alone again, if I must really go on living. They will come tomorrow, strange, hulking, black-clad men bringing a coffin, and they will put him in it, my poor boy, my only child.”

— Stefan Zweig

98. “Immer sind die Instinkte wissender als unsere wachen Gedanken.”

— Stefan Zweig

99. “Montaigne is the sworn enemy of all responsibility. He strives to dodge decisions. Solitary sage in a time of mass fanaticism, he seeks seclusion and flight.”

— Stefan Zweig

100. “The power of love is not properly gauged if it is estimated only by the object that inspires it, if the tension preceding it is not taken into account – that gloomy space of disillusionment and loneliness which stretches in front of all the great events of the heart.”

— Stefan Zweig