Stefan Zweig World Quotations

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

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

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

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

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.

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