Stefan Zweig Quotes

In history as in human life, regret does not bring back a lost moment and a thousand years will not recover something lost in a single hour.

Truth to tell, we are all criminals if we remain silent.

It is never until one realizes that one means something to others that one feels there is any point or purpose in one's own existence.

Freedom is not possible without authority - otherwise it would turn into chaos and authority is not possible without freedom - otherwise it would turn into tyranny.

All I know is that I shall be alone again. There is nothing more terrible than to be alone among human beings.

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

In history, the moments during which reason and reconciliation prevail are short and fleeting.

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

Only the person who has experienced light and darkness, war and peace, rise and fall, only that person has truly experienced life.

Hairdressers are professional gossips; when only the hands are busy, the tongue is seldom still.

Those whom fate has dealt hard knocks remain vulnerable for ever afterwards.

When they are preparing for war, those who rule by force speak most copiously about peace until they have completed the mobilization process.

How terrible this darkness was, how bewildering, and yet mysteriously beautiful!

Often the presence of mind and energy of a person remote from the spotlight decide the course of history for centuries to come.

Every wave, regardless of how high and forceful it crests, must eventually collapse within itself.

One can run away from anything but oneself.

One must be convinced to convince, to have enthusiasm to stimulate the others.

Happy people are poor psychologists.

No guilt is forgotten so long as the conscience still knows of it.

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

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

The free, independent spirit who commits himself to no dogma and will not decide in favor of any party has no homestead on earth.

In chess, as a purely intellectual game, where randomness is excluded, - for someone to play against himself is absurd ... It is as paradoxical, as attempting to jump over his own shadow.

Why is it that the stupidest people are always the most good-natured?

The idea of Jewish unity, of a plan, an organization, unfortunately exists only in the brains of Hitler and Streicher.

Dostoevsky was the first to reveal to us this teeming multiplicity of emotions, this complexity of our spiritual universe.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Ah, how fatefully swift is the move from one feeling to another.

Never can the innate power of a work be hidden or locked away. A work of art can be forgotten by time; it can be forbidden and rejected but the elemental will always prevail over the ephemeral.

Fate is never too generous even to its favorites. Rarely do the gods grant a mortal more than one immortal deed.

And fate? No one alive has ever escaped it, neither brave man nor coward, I tell you-- it's born with us the day that we are born.

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

for the more a man restricts himself the closer he is, conversely, to infinity.

There is no sense to a sacrifice after you come to feel that it is a sacrifice.

Through suffering we have endured the assaults of time; reverses have ever been our beginning; and out of the depths God has gathered us to his heart.

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.

It is better to pay tribute of gold to the enemy than tribute of blood in war.

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.

Everything in life that deviates from the straight and, so to speak, normal line, makes people first curious and then indignant.

Nothing whets the intelligence more than a passionate suspicion, nothing develops all the faculties of an immature mind more than a trail running away into the dark.

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.

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

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