Top 200 Stefan Zweig Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “That is how our arch-adventurer likes to live, moving on from explosion to explosion of fortune and misfortune.”

— Stefan Zweig

152. “And the child – your child – was born there in the midst of misery. It was a deadly place: strange, everything was strange, we women lying there were strange to each other, lonely and hating one another out of misery, the same torment in that crowded ward full of chloroform and blood, screams and groans.”

— Stefan Zweig

153. “He felt a kind of bridal expectation, sweet and sensuous yet vaguely mingled with anticipatory fear of its own fulfilment, with the mysterious shiver felt when something endlessly desired suddenly comes physically close to the astonished heart.”

— Stefan Zweig

154. “No envy is more mean than that of small-minded beings when they see a neighbor lifted, as though borne aloft by angels, out of the dull drudgery of their common existence; petty spirits are more ready to forgive a prince the most fabulous wealth than a fellow-sufferer beneath the same yoke the smallest degree of freedom.”

— Stefan Zweig

155. “Ambition had never troubled me, so I decided to begin by watching life at my leisure for a few years, waiting until I finally felt tempted to find some circle of influence for myself.”

— Stefan Zweig

156. “I saw how the idea, still colourless, nothing but pure and flowing heat, streamed from the furnace of his impulsive excitement like the molten metal to make a bell, then gradually, as it cooled, took shape, I saw how that shape rounded out powerfully and revealed itself, until at last the words rang from it and gave human language to poetic feeling, just as the clapper gives the bell its sound.”

— Stefan Zweig

157. “Perhaps only those who are strangers to passion know such sudden outbursts of emotion in their few passionate moments, moments of emotion like an avalanche or a hurricane; whole years fall from one’s own breast with the fury of powers left unused.”

— Stefan Zweig

158. “But this first installation was by no means the last. Every year the Queen had some new fancy for beautifying her miniature kingdom with more highly artificial and more “natural” additions and alterations.”

— Stefan Zweig

159. “He had no taste for his own company and avoided such an encounter as much as possible, for the last thing he wanted was to make close acquaintance with himself.”

— Stefan Zweig

160. “And once again I feel, in horror, how weak, poor and flabby a substance whatever we call by the names of soul, spirit or feeling must be after all, not to mention what we describe as pain, since all this, even to the utmost degree, is insufficient to destroy the suffering flesh of the tormented body entirely – for we do survive such hours and our blood continues to pulse, instead of dying and falling like a tree struck by lightning.“...”

— Stefan Zweig

161. “This contact with the overpowering is her first encounter with travel’s disconcerting ability to strip the hard shell of habit from the heart, leaving only the bare, fertile kernel.”

— Stefan Zweig

162. “Has this new dress, this new world made me so different? Or was this inside me all along, and I was just too fainthearted, too timid? That’s what Mother always said. 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.”

— Stefan Zweig

163. “How Lilliputian all those anxieties were, how serene that time!”

— Stefan Zweig

164. “A well-chosen tie could make me almost merry; a good book, an excursion in a motor car or an hour with a woman left me fully satisfied. It particularly pleased me to ensure that this way of life, like a faultlessly correct suit of English tailoring, did not make me conspicuous in any way. I believe I was considered pleasant company, I was popular and welcome in society, and most who knew me called me a happy man.”

— Stefan Zweig

165. “He lived one of those lives that seem otiose because they are not linked to any community of interest, because all the riches stored in them by a thousand separate valuable experiences will pass when their last breath is drawn, without anyone to inherit them.”

— Stefan Zweig

166. “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

167. “Poverty was crushing all the feeling they had. It was intolerable to be together this way, and yet they tolerated it.”

— Stefan Zweig

168. “He read as others pray, as gamblers follow the spinning of the roulette wheel, as drunkards stare into vacancy; he read with such profound absorption that ever since I first watched him the reading of ordinary mortals seemed a pastime.”

— Stefan Zweig

169. “We must “conserve the freedom of our soul and not mortgage it, except on those rare occasions when we deem it the right path”.”

— Stefan Zweig

170. “All my life I have been passionately interested in monomaniacs of any kind, people carried away by a single idea. The more one limits oneself, the closer one is to the infinite; these people, as unworldly as they seem, burrow like termites into their own particular material to construct, in miniature, a strange and utterly individual image of the world.”

— Stefan Zweig

171. “Never have I experienced in a people and in myself so powerful a surge of life as at that period when our very existence and survival were at stake.”

— Stefan Zweig

172. “Do not be afraid of my words: a dead woman wants nothing more, she wants neither love nor pity nor consolation.”

— Stefan Zweig

173. “The true essence of freedom is that it can never restrict the freedom of another.”

— Stefan Zweig

174. “See, that’s what we’re like. You’re brave and you’re not afraid to die, but you’re afraid of being late for work. That’s how enslaved we are, that’s how ingrained it is.”

— Stefan Zweig

175. “The instinct of self-deception in human beings makes them try to banish from their minds dangers of which at the bottom they are perfectly aware by declaring them nonexistent, and a warning such as mine against cheap optimism was bound to prove particularly unwelcome at a moment when a sumptuously laid supper was awaiting for us in the next room.”

— Stefan Zweig

176. “Personally I take more satisfaction in understanding people than in passing judgement on them.”

— Stefan Zweig

177. “There is nothing on earth like the love of a child that passes unnoticed in the dark because she has no hope: her love is submissive, so much a servant’s love, passionate and lying in wait, in a way that the avid yet unconsciously demanding love of a grown woman can never be.”

— Stefan Zweig

178. “He felt that it was a mistake to look for signs and portents instead of waiting until they were revealed to him in their own good time.”

— Stefan Zweig

179. “But travelling, even as far as to other worlds under other stars, did not allow me to escape Europe and my anxieties. However far I went from Europe, its fate came with me.”

— Stefan Zweig

180. “Nun erst lebte die Stadt, die mich so fremd, so sinnlos umbraust hatte, nun erst lebte ich wieder, das ich Dich nahe ahnte, Dich, meinen ewigen Traum.”

— Stefan Zweig

181. “For a society is always most cruel to those who disclose and reveal its secrets, when through dishonesty society itself has outraged Nature.”

— Stefan Zweig

182. “There is always a mysterious conflict in every artist; if life treats him roughly he longs for peace and calm, but if he comes into safe harbour he longs to be back in the turmoil.”

— Stefan Zweig

183. “War does not permit itself to be coordinated with reason and righteousness. It needs stimulated emotions, enthusiasm for its own cause and hatred for the adversary.”

— Stefan Zweig

184. “To free oneself from fear and hope, belief and superstition. To be free of convictions and parties.”

— Stefan Zweig

185. “The most just death is that which is most willed. Our lives depend on the will of others, but death on ourselves alone. There is nothing to which we should apply ourselves more than this. Reputation has no place here and it is folly to think of it. Life is servitude if we lack the freedom to die.”

— Stefan Zweig

186. “Gratitude is a rare frame of mind; and those who are grateful can seldom find a way to express what they feel. They are overwhelmed by silence; are shamefaced; and, sometimes, actually try to hide their feelings.”

— Stefan Zweig

187. “That’s it. Evasion is key.”

— Stefan Zweig

188. “It is my opinion that you should lend yourself to others and give yourself only to yourself.”

— Stefan Zweig

189. “The woman has a dangerous decision to confront, whether she will live her own life, or that of her children, whether she will be a woman first or a mother first.”

— Stefan Zweig

190. “He is at one and the same time all and nothing, always different and yet ever the same, the Montaigne of 1550, 1560, 1570, 1580, the Montaigne of yesterday.”

— Stefan Zweig

191. “Death is a certain refuge, never to be feared”; “Strong diseases require strong remedies”, writes Montaigne.”

— Stefan Zweig

192. “To be free of customs: “Custom clouds the true face of things”.”

— Stefan Zweig

193. “It is true: Montaigne achieved little else in his life aside from posing the question: “How should I live?”

— Stefan Zweig

194. “The writer in him is only the shadow of the man, though so often we observe men whose art of writing is so great, but whose art of living is so modest.”

— Stefan Zweig

195. “I had no witness against me left but my own memory.“...”

— Stefan Zweig

196. “To guard oneself from presumption.”

— Stefan Zweig

197. “I do not subscribe to this communal error of judging a man according to the way I perceive things.”

— Stefan Zweig

198. “And I said to myself: from now on, help anyone and everyone so far as in you lies. Cease to be apathetic, indifferent! 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. And my heart, astonished at its own workings, quivered with gratitude towards the sick girl whom I had unwittingly hurt and who, through her suffering, had taught me the creative magic of pity.”

— Stefan Zweig

199. “He desires only to preserve a few memories, assemble a few thoughts, to dream more than live and patiently await death, calmly preparing for it.”

— Stefan Zweig

200. “And the strength of love is always misjudged if we evaluate it only 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. A great, unused capacity for emotion had been lying in wait, and now it raced with outstretched arms towards the first person who seemed to deserve it.”

— Stefan Zweig