Top 200 Stefan Zweig Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Querer jugar contra uno mismo representa, en definitiva, una paradoja tan grande como querer saltar sobre la propia sombra.”

— Stefan Zweig

102. “But I see nothing miraculous about it. Nothing makes one as healthy as happiness, and there is no greater happiness than making someone else happy.”

— Stefan Zweig

103. “There are two kinds of pity. One, the weak and sentimental kind, which is really no more than the heart’s impatience to be rid as quickly as possible of the painful emotion aroused by the sight of another’s unhappiness, that pity which is not compassion, but only an instinctive desire to fortify one’s own soul agains the sufferings of another; and the other, the only one at counts, the unsentimental but creative kind, which knows what it is about and is determined to hold out, in patience and forbearance, to the very limit of its strength and even beyond.”

— Stefan Zweig

104. “IF I TRY TO FIND some useful phrase to sum up the time of my childhood and youth before the First World War, I hope I can put it most succinctly by calling it the Golden Age of Security.”

— Stefan Zweig

105. “All the bourgeois virtues, caution, obedience, zeal and thoughtfulness- they all melt away powerless in the fire of the great fateful moment that always demands only genius and forms it into a a lasting image. Contemptuously it repulses the timid man; it, another god of the earth, with fiery arms, lifts only the bold into the heaven of heroes.”

— Stefan Zweig

106. “Nothing gives so keen an edge to the intelligence as a passionate suspicion.”

— Stefan Zweig

107. “Once more my pity had been stronger than my will.”

— Stefan Zweig

108. “She could be lively only in the midst of life; in isolation she dwindled to a shadow.”

— Stefan Zweig

109. “Only the man who remains free from all and everything augments and sustains freedom on this earth.”

— Stefan Zweig

110. “What decides whether a man will become immortal, is not his character but his vitality. Nothing save intensity confers immortality. A man manifests himself more vividly, in proportion as he is strong and unified, effective and unique. Immortality knows nothing of morality or immorality, of good or evil; it measures only work and strength; it demands from a man not purity but unity. Here, morality is nothing; intensity, all.”

— Stefan Zweig

111. “It is only the immeasurable, the limitless that terrifies us. That which is set within defined, fixed limits is a challenge to our powers, comes to be the measure of our strength.”

— Stefan Zweig

112. “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.”

— Stefan Zweig

113. “And it is only delusion, and not knowledge, that bestows happiness.”

— Stefan Zweig

114. “Time is helpless, he thought to himself, helpless in the face of our feelings. Nine years have passed, and not a note in her voice is different, not a nerve in my body hears her in any other way. Nothing is lost, nothing is past and over, her presence is as much of a tender delight now as it was then.”

— Stefan Zweig

115. “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.”

— Stefan Zweig

116. “The longest voyage of discovery, the boldest adventure in the records of our race, had begun.”

— Stefan Zweig

117. “In earlier times, when there was a rage for physiognomy, a Gall might have dissected the brains of such chess champions to determine whether there was a special convolution in their gray matter, a kind of chess muscle or chess bump more strongly marked than in the skulls of others. And how excited such a physiognomist would.”

— Stefan Zweig

118. “But spite is a wonderful thing for keeping people alive.”

— Stefan Zweig

119. “It always demands a far greater degree of courage for an individual to oppose an organized movement than to let himself be carried along with the stream – individual courage, that is, a variety of courage that is dying out in these times of progressive organization and mechanization.”

— Stefan Zweig

120. “But we need to make a distinction: we can love this or that, but we cannot “form a marriage bond” unless it is with our own selves.”

— Stefan Zweig

121. “One goes wherever one is still admitted. Someone told me that I might be able to get a visa for Haiti or San Domingo here.”

— Stefan Zweig

122. “Do you still have all the ideals, all the ideals that you took to that distant world with you? Are they all still intact, or have some of them died or withered away? Haven’t they been torn out of you by force and flung in the dirt, where thousands of wheels carrying vehicles to their owners’ destination in life crushed them? Or have you lost none of them?”

— Stefan Zweig

123. “Gratitude is so seldom found, and those who are most grateful cannot express it, are silent in their confusion, or ashamed, or sometimes seem ungracious just to conceal their feelings.“...”

— Stefan Zweig

124. “He listened yet more intently to what was within him, to the past, to see whether that voice of memory truly foretelling the future would not speak to him again, revealing the present to him as well as the past.”

— Stefan Zweig

125. “For the first time I began to perceive that true sympathy cannot be switched on and off like an electric current, that anyone that identifies himself with the fate of another is robbed to some extent of his own freedom.”

— Stefan Zweig

126. “A life without envy, hatred and lies was not a life worth living.”

— Stefan Zweig

127. “Consciously or unconsciously, our education renders us slaves to morals, religion and a perceived vision of the world; our breath is the air of the epoch in which we live.”

— Stefan Zweig

128. “Nothing on earth exerts such pressure on the human soul as a void.”

— Stefan Zweig

129. “For only he who lives his life as a mystery is truly alive.”

— Stefan Zweig

130. “Pity, like morphine, does the sick good only at first. It is a means of helping them to feel better, but if you don’t get the dose right and know where to stop it becomes a murderous poison.”

— Stefan Zweig

131. “Neither she nor he was the same any more, yet they were searching for each other in a vain effort, fleeing one another, persisting in disembodied, powerless efforts like those black spectres at their feet.”

— Stefan Zweig

132. “I am an impatient, temperamental reader. Anything long-winded, high-flown or gushing irritates me, so does everything that is vague and indistinct, in fact anything that unnecessarily holds the reader up, whether in a novel, a biography or an intellectual argument.”

— Stefan Zweig

133. “He sensed the presence of death, he sensed the presence of undying love: something broke open inside him, and he thought of the invisible woman, incorporeal and passionate, as one might think of distant music.”

— Stefan Zweig

134. “It’s not your fault. But whose fault is it? Why are we always the ones who suffer? We didn’t do anything, we didn’t do anything to anyone, but every step we take is a trap.”

— Stefan Zweig

135. “A lame creature, a cripple like myself, has no right to love. How should I, broken, shattered being that I am, be anything but a burden to you, when to myself I am an object of disgust, of loathing. A creature such as I, I know, has no right to love, and certainly no right to be loved. It is for such a creature to creep away into a corner and die and cease to make other people’s lives a burden with her presence.”

— Stefan Zweig

136. “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.”

— Stefan Zweig

137. “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.”

— Stefan Zweig

138. “She wanted, out of a kind of mysterious vindictiveness born of despair, to torture us with her torture, to arraign us, the hale and hearty, in the place of God.”

— Stefan Zweig

139. “An intellect that does not have a fixed target is as good as lost. Whoever wants to be everywhere is nowhere. No wind blows for him who has no harbour.”

— Stefan Zweig

140. “They did nothing – other than subjecting us to complete nothingness. For, as is well known, nothing on earth puts more pressure on the human mind than nothing.”

— Stefan Zweig

141. “For the first time in my life I had received an assurance that I had been of use to someone on this earth, and my astonishment at the thought that I, a commonplace, unsophisticated young officer, should really have the power to make someone else so happy knew no bounds.”

— Stefan Zweig

142. “We also want to leave our own area behind, our domestic world so well regulated day to day; we are drawn by the desire no longer to be at home and therefore no longer to be ourselves. We want to interrupt a life where we merely exist, in order to live more.”

— Stefan Zweig

143. “My today and each of my yesterdays, my rises and falls, are so diverse that I sometimes feel as if I had lived not one, but several existences, each one different from the others.”

— Stefan Zweig

144. “The clouds floating white and restless in the sky were those you see only in May or June. They were innocent companions, still young and flighty, who ran playfully across the blue road to hide suddenly behind high mountains, linking arms and running away, sometimes crumpling up like handkerchiefs, sometimes unravelling into streamers, and eventually playing a practical joke by setting themselves down on the mountain like white caps.”

— Stefan Zweig

145. “Arrived at an age when others had already long been married and had children and held important positions, and were obliged to produce the best that was in them with all their energy, I still regarded myself as youthful, a beginner who faced immeasurable time, and I was hesitant about final decisions of any kind.”

— Stefan Zweig

146. “Our decisions are to a much greater extent dependent on our desire to conform to the standards of our class and environment than we are inclined to admit. A considerable proportion of our reasoning is merely an automatic function, so to speak, of influences and impressions which have become part of us...”

— Stefan Zweig

147. “But you wouldn’t believe what a dead finger does to a living hand.”

— Stefan Zweig

148. “That is how our arch-adventurer likes to live, moving on from explosion to explosion of fortune and misfortune.”

— Stefan Zweig

149. “For vanity, too, inebriates; gratitude, too, intoxicates; tenderness, too, can blissfully confuse the senses.”

— Stefan Zweig

150. “It is generally accepted that getting rich is the only and typical goal of the Jew. Nothing could be further from the truth. Riches are to him merely a stepping stone, a means to the true end, and in no sense the real goal. The real determination of the Jew is to rise to a higher cultural plane in the intellectual world.”

— Stefan Zweig