Stefan Zweig
Stefan Zweig
Stefan Zweigwas an Austrian novelist, playwright, journalist and biographer. At the height of his literary career, in the 1920s and 1930s, he was one of the most popular writers in the world...
NationalityAustrian
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth28 November 1881
CountryAustria
Stefan Zweig quotes about
flower book men
For this quiet, unprepossessing, passive man who has no garden in front of his subsidised flat, books are like flowers. He loves to line them up on the shelf in multicoloured rows: he watches over each of them with an old-fashioned gardener's delight, holds them like fragile objects in his thin, bloodless hands.
pain stress water
There's an inherent limit to the stress that any material can bear. Water has its boiling point, metals their melting points. The elements of the spirit behave the same way. Happiness can reach a pitch so great that any further happiness can't be felt. Pain, despair, humiliation, disgust, and fear are no different. Once the vessel is full, the world can't add to it.
soul stuff firsts
In this instant, shaken to her very depths, this ecstatic human being has a first inkling that the soul is made of stuff so mysteriously elastic that a single event can make it big enough to contain the infinite.
beautiful darkness terrible
How terrible this darkness was, how bewildering, and yet mysteriously beautiful!
presence-of-mind spotlight energy
Often the presence of mind and energy of a person remote from the spotlight decide the course of history for centuries to come.
wave collapse
Every wave, regardless of how high and forceful it crests, must eventually collapse within itself.
pain heart roots
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.
feelings secret mind
We live through myriads of seconds, yet it is always one, just one, that casts our entire inner world into turmoil, the second when (as Stendhal has described it) the internal inflorescence, already steeped in every kind of fluid, condenses and crystallizes—a magical second, like the moment of generation, and like that moment concealed in the warm interior of the individual life, invisible, untouchable, beyond the reach of feeling, a secret experienced alone. No algebra of the mind can calculate it, no alchemy of premonition divine it, and it can seldom perceive itself.
hero discovery conquer-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
world england horizon
Now I am discovering the world once more. England has widened my horizon.
sacrifice satisfaction feels
There is no sense to a sacrifice after you come to feel that it is a sacrifice.
fear mirrors imagination
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.
fate deeds demise
Fate is never too generous even to its favorites. Rarely do the gods grant a mortal more than one immortal deed.
terrible humans human-beings
All I know is that I shall be alone again. There is nothing more terrible than to be alone among human beings.