Stefan Zweig Quotations | Page 2

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.

It is usual for a woman, even though she may ardently desire to give herself to a man, to feign reluctance, to simulate alarm or indignation. She must be brought to consent by urgent pleading, by lies, adjurations, and promises. I know that only professional prostitutes are accustomed to answer such an invitation with a perfectly frank assent -- prostitutes, or simple-minded, immature girls.

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.

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

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.

The organic fundamental error of humanism was that it desired to educate the common people (on whom it looked down) from its lofty stance instead of trying to understand them and to learn from them.

Decisive inventions and discoveries always are initiated by an intellectual or moral stimulus as their actual motivating force, but, usually, the final impetus to human action is given by material impulses ... merchants stood as a driving force behind the heroes of the age of discovery; this first heroic impulse to conquer the world emanated from very mortal forces

Whatever a woman's reason may say, her feelings tell her the truth.

There are two types of compassion. One - is faint-hearted and sentimental. Actually, it is nothing more than impatience of the heart, that is hurrying to get rid of that hard feeling when you see other peoples' sufferings; this is not a compassion, but just an instinct will to defence yourself from misfortunes of others. But there is another compassion - real one, that demands for actions, not sentiments, it knows what it wants, and it is full of determination to do everything, what is in human power and even beyond it.

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

Each of us, even the lowliest and most insignificant among us, was uprooted from his innermost existence by the almost constant volcanic upheavals visited upon our European soil and, as one of countless human beings, I can't claim any special place for myself except that, as an Austrian, a Jew, writer, humanist and pacifist, I have always been precisely in those places where the effects of the thrusts were most violent.

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.

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.

Fear is a distorting mirror in which anything can appear as a caricature of itself, stretched to terrible proportions; once inflamed, the imagination pursues the craziest and most unlikely possibilities. What is most absurd suddenly seems the most probable.

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.

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.

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

One can run away from anything but oneself.

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

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.

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.

What is noble, lyrical, tender in the upper level shown is also with the servants, scoundrels, and scamps, as in a distorting mirror. This contrast seems to me a most appealing musical theme--to show love in its noble and crude forms, romanticism and crass realism mixed as in everyday life.

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.

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.

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.

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?

The dressmaker doesn't have problems unless the dress has to hide rather than reveal.

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.

He was, like everyone of a strongly erotic disposition, twice as good, twice as much himself when he knew that women liked him, just as many actors find their most ardent vein when they sense that they have cast their spell over the audience, the breathing mass of spectators before them.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

He who is himself crossed in love is able from time to time to master his passion, for he is not the creature but the creator of his own misery; and if a lover is unable to control his passion, he at least knows that he is himself to blame for his sufferings. But he who is loved without reciprocating that love is lost beyond redemption, for it is not in his power to set a limit to that other's passion, to keep it within bounds, and the strongest will is reduced to impotence in the face of another's desire.

In my youth and comparative inexperience I had always regarded the yearning and pangs of love as the worst torture that could afflict the human heart. At this moment, however, I began to realize that there was another and perhaps grimmer torture than that of longing and desiring: that of being loved against one's will and of being unable to defend oneself against the urgency of another's passion; of seeing another human being seared by the flame of her desire and of having to look impotently, lacking the power, the capacity, the strength to pluck her from the flames.

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

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.