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
advice events flow generation influence life next offer power
The life of our generation is now set. We do not have the power to influence the flow of events, and no right to offer advice to the next generation.
fleeting moments reason
In history, the moments during which reason and reconciliation prevail are short and fleeting.
truth silence criminals
Truth to tell, we are all criminals if we remain silent....
greatness thinking decision
Sometimes I have the feeling that you are not quite aware--and this honors you--of the historical greatness of your position, that you think too modestly about yourself. Everything you do is destined to be of historic significance. One day, your letters, your decisions, will belong to all mankind, like those of Wagner and Brahms.
voice today too-much
I had learned and written too much history not to know that the great masses always and at once respond to the force of gravity in the direction of the powers that be. I knew that the same voices which yelled "Heil Schuschnigg" today would thunder "Heil Hitler" tomorrow.
long guilt forgotten
No guilt is forgotten so long as the conscience still knows of it.
disappointment loneliness stress
The strength of a love is always misjudged if we evaluate it 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.
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.
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.
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.
world england horizon
Now I am discovering the world once more. England has widened my horizon.
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.
feelings may reason
Whatever a woman's reason may say, her feelings tell her the truth.