Stefan Zweig
When they are preparing for war, those who rule by force speak most copiously about peace until they have completed the mobilization process.Collection: War
One must be convinced to convince, to have enthusiasm to stimulate the others.Collection: Leadership
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.Collection: History
Fate is never too generous even to its favorites. Rarely do the gods grant a mortal more than one immortal deed.
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.
Only the misfortune of exile can provide the in-depth understanding and the overview into the realities of the world.
There is no sense to a sacrifice after you come to feel that it is a sacrifice.
It would be foolhardy to count on the conscience of the world.
The free, independent spirit who commits himself to no dogma and will not decide in favor of any party has no homestead on earth.
Now I am discovering the world once more. England has widened my horizon.
Only the person who has experienced light and darkness, war and peace, rise and fall, only that person has truly experienced life.
In history, the moments during which reason and reconciliation prevail are short and fleeting.
The idea of Jewish unity, of a plan, an organization, unfortunately exists only in the brains of Hitler and Streicher.
Today, for a Jew who writes in the German language, it is totally impossible to make a living. In no group do I see as much misery, disappointment, desperation and hopelessness as in Jewish writers who write in German.
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.
One can run away from anything but oneself.Collection: Running
Truth to tell, we are all criminals if we remain silent.Collection: Truth
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.Collection: Mean
Time to leave now, get out of this room, go somewhere, anywhere; sharpen this feeling of happiness and freedom, stretch your limbs, fill your eyes, be awake, wider awake, vividly awake in every sense and every pore.Collection: Eye
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.Collection: Chaos
Happy people are poor psychologists.Collection: People
No guilt is forgotten so long as the conscience still knows of it.Collection: Long
All I know is that I shall be alone again. There is nothing more terrible than to be alone among human beings.Collection: Terrible
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.Collection: Men
To grow old means to be rid of anxieties about the past.Collection: Mean
Memory is so corrupt that you remember only what you want to; if you want to forget about something, slowly but surely you do.Collection: Memories
Life is futile unless it be directed towards a definite goal.Collection: Life
One never gets to know a person's character better than by watching his behavior during decisive moments.... It is always only danger which forces the most deeply hidden strengths and abilities of a human being to come forth.Collection: Strength
Why is it that the stupidest people are always the most good-natured?Collection: People
There is nothing more vindictive, nothing more underhanded, than a little world that would like to be a big one.Collection: World
He who studies without passion will never become anything more than a pedant.Collection: Passion
A word is nothing unless it has values and an atmosphere, unless you grasp its historical significance.Collection: Historical
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.Collection: Pain
The works of the great artists are silent books of eternal truths.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Fall
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.Collection: Destiny
She was at that crucial age when a women begins to regret having stayed faithful to a husband she never really loved, when the glowing sunset colors of her beauty offer her one last, urgent choice between maternal and feminine love. At such a moment a life that seemed to have chosen its course long ago is questioned once again, for the last time the magic compass needle of the will hovers between final resignation and the hope of erotic experience.Collection: Love
Dostoevsky was the first to reveal to us this teeming multiplicity of emotions, this complexity of our spiritual universe.Collection: Spiritual
It is better to be the servant of God than the ruler of men.Collection: Men
It is a blessing not yet to have acquired that over-keen, diagnostic, misanthropic eye, and to be able to look at people and things trustfully when one first sees them.Collection: Eye
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.Collection: Play
Only ambition is fired by the coincidences of success and easy accomplishment.Collection: Ambition
Nothing that has ever been thought and said with a clear mind and pure ethical strength is totally in vain; even if it comes froma weak hand and is imperfectly formed, it inspires the ethical spirit to constantly renewed creation.Collection: Inspirational
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.Collection: Unhappy
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.Collection: Pieces
Long-protracted suffering is apt to exhaust not only the invalid, but the compassion of others; violent emotions cannot be prolonged endlessly.Collection: Compassion
Every epoch which seeks renewal first projects its ideal into a human form. In order to comprehend its own essence tangibly, the spirit of the time chooses a human being as its prototype and raising this single individual, often one upon whom it has chanced to come, far beyond his measure, the spirit enthuses itself for its own enthusiasm.Collection: Change
(Heinrich von) Kleist would not be a Prussian if his first thought would not have been orderlinessand he would not be a German if he had not placed all his hopes of developing this inner orderliness into education. Education is the secret of life for him as for every German: studying, learning a lot from books, sitting in lectures, keeping notebooks, listening intently to professors.Collection: Notebook
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.Collection: Girl