110+ Stefan Zweig Quotes On Education, Death And World

Stefan Zweig was an Austrian writer, born in Vienna in 1881. He wrote novels, plays, biographies and essays, and was a major figure in the literary world of the 1920s and 1930s. He committed suicide in 1942, while in exile in Brazil. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Stefan Zweig on education, life, love.

Top 10 Stefan Zweig Quotes

1. 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.
2. Only the person who has experienced light and darkness, war and peace, rise and fall, only that person has truly experienced life.
3. In history, the moments during which reason and reconciliation prevail are short and fleeting.
4. There is nothing more vindictive, nothing more underhanded, than a little world that would like to be a big one.
5. Only the misfortune of exile can provide the in-depth understanding and the overview into the realities of the world.
6. Hairdressers are professional gossips; when only the hands are busy, the tongue is seldom still.
7. Often the presence of mind and energy of a person remote from the spotlight decide the course of history for centuries to come.
8. Those whom fate has dealt hard knocks remain vulnerable for ever afterwards.
9. When they are preparing for war, those who rule by force speak most copiously about peace until they have completed the mobilization process.
10. Every wave, regardless of how high and forceful it crests, must eventually collapse within itself.

Stefan Zweig Short Quotes

• 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.
• Why is it that the stupidest people are always the most good-natured?
• There is no sense to a sacrifice after you come to feel that it is a sacrifice.
• The dressmaker doesn't have problems unless the dress has to hide rather than reveal.
• One can run away from anything but oneself.
• The works of the great artists are silent books of eternal truths.
• Truth to tell, we are all criminals if we remain silent.
• Only ambition is fired by the coincidences of success and easy accomplishment.

Stefan Zweig Quotes About Life

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

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. — Stefan Zweig

It is a law of life that human beings, even the geniuses among them, do not pride themselves on their actual achievements but thatthey want to impress others, want to be admired and respected because of things of much lower import and value. — Stefan Zweig

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

What is noble, lyrical, tender in the upper level shown is also with the servants, scoundrels, and scamps, as in a distorting mirror. This contrast seems to me a most appealing musical theme--to show love in its noble and crude forms, romanticism and crass realism mixed as in everyday life. — Stefan Zweig

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. — Stefan Zweig

A first premonition of the rich variety of life had come to him; for the first time he thought he had understood the nature of human beings - they needed each other even when they appeared hostile, and it was very sweet to be loved by them. — Stefan Zweig

As we grow old, we become aware that death is drawing near; his shadow falls across our path; the realities of life seem less crude than of yore, they touch our senses less intimately, and they lose much of their poignancy. — Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes About World

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

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

But in the intellectual world, there is room for all opposing forces: even that which never appears victorious in the real world continues to be effective as a dynamic force (in the intellectual world) and precisely the unfulfilled ideals prove to be the most invincible. — Stefan Zweig

Heroic ages are not and never were sentimental and those daring conquistadores who conquered entire worlds for their Spain or Portugal received lamentably little thanks from their kings. — Stefan Zweig

For the more a man limits himself, the nearer he is on the other hand to what is limitless; it is precisely those who are apparently aloof from the world who build for themselves a remarkable and thoroughly individual world in miniature, using their own special equipment, termit-like. — Stefan Zweig

Whilst all the land was ringed with bristling arms And flames laid waste our world, All that was left me was a little garden And thou within it, my beloved, my comrade. — Stefan Zweig

When it looks at great accomplishments, the world, bent on simplifying its images, likes best to look at the dramatic, picturesquemoments experienced by its heroes.... But the no less creative years of preparation remain in the shadow. — Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes About Intellectual

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. — Stefan Zweig

Against my will, I became a witness to the most terrible defeat of reason and to the most savage triumph of brutality ever chroniclednever before did a generation suffer such a moral setback after it had attained such intellectual heights. — Stefan Zweig

Immanuel Kant lived with knowledge as with his lawfully wedded wife, slept with it in the same intellectual bed for forty years and begot an entire German race of philosophical systems. — Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Quotes About Person

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. — Stefan Zweig

But the creative person is subject to a different, higher law than mere national law. Whoever has to create a work, whoever has tobring about a discovery or deed which will further the cause of all of humanity, no longer has his home in his native land but rather in his work. — Stefan Zweig

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. — Stefan Zweig

But, in history, practical usefulness never determines the moral value of an achievement. Only the person who increases the knowledge humanity has about itself and enhances its creative consciousness permanently enriches humanity. — Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig Famous Quotes And Sayings

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. — Stefan Zweig

Only that which points the human spirit beyond its own limitations into what is universally human gives the individual strength superior to his own. Only in suprahuman demands which can hardly be fulfilled do human beings and peoples feel their true and sacred measure. — Stefan Zweig

Art knows no happier moment than the opportunity to show the symmetry of an extreme, during that moment of spheric harmony when the dissonance dissolves for the blink of an eye, dissolves into a blissful harmony, when the most extreme opposites, coming together from the greatest alienation, fleetingly touch with lips of the word and of love. — Stefan Zweig

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. — Stefan Zweig

The transformation of the impossible into reality is always the mark of a demonic will. The only way to recognize a military genius is by the fact that, during the war, he will mock the rules of warfare and will employ creative improvisation instead of tested methods and he will do so at the right moment. — Stefan Zweig

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. — Stefan Zweig

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

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

For I regard memory not as a phenomenon preserving one thing and losing another merely by chance, but as a power that deliberately places events in order or wisely omits them. Everything we forget about our own lives was really condemned to oblivion by an inner instinct long ago. — Stefan Zweig

Again and again, faith in a possible satisfaction of the human race breaks through at the very moments of most zealous discord because humankind will never be able to live and work without this consoling delusion of its ascent into morality, without this dream of final and ultimate accord. — Stefan Zweig

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. — Stefan Zweig

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. — Stefan Zweig

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

The Battle of Waterloo is a work of art with tension and drama with its unceasing change from hope to fear and back again, changewhich suddenly dissolves into a moment of extreme catastrophe, a model tragedy because the fate of Europe was determined within this individual fate. — Stefan Zweig

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. — Stefan Zweig

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. — Stefan Zweig

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. — Stefan Zweig

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

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

The greater part of our best years has been passed for our generation in these two great worldconvulsions. All will be changed after this war, which spends in one month more than nations earned before in yearsthere is no more security in our time than in those of the Reformation or the fall of Rome. — Stefan Zweig

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. — Stefan Zweig

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. — Stefan Zweig

He who has been impoverished for a long timewho has long stood before the door of the mighty in darkness and begged for alms,has filled his heart with bitterness so that it resembles a sponge full of gall; he knows about the injustice and folly of all human action and sometimes his lips tremble with rage and a stifled scream. — Stefan Zweig

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. — Stefan Zweig

With Nietzsche, the black pirates' flag appears for the first time on the high sea of German knowledge. (He is) a different man, from a different race, (his,) a new kind of heroism, philosophywith bellicose weapons and armor. — Stefan Zweig

The instinct for self-deception in human beings makes them try to banish from their minds dangers of which at bottom they are perfectly aware by declaring them non-existent. — Stefan Zweig

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. — Stefan Zweig

Even from the abyss of horror in which we try to feel our way today, half-blind, our hearts distraught and shattered, I look up again and again to the ancient constellations that shone on my childhood, comforting myself with the inherited confidence that, some day, this relapse will appear only an interval in the eternal rhythm of progress onward and upward. — Stefan Zweig

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. — Stefan Zweig

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. — Stefan Zweig

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

(Brazil:) I've never beheld such a paradise. The people are enchanting and--a mercy on this earth of ours--this is the only placewhere there isn't any race question. Negroes and whites and Indians, three-quarters, oneeighth, the wonderful Mulatto and Creole women, Jews and Christians, all dwell together in a peace that passes describing. The Jewish immigrants are in seventh heaven; all of them have jobs and feel at home. — Stefan Zweig

We can't forever be spending our lives paying for political follies that never gave us anything but always took from us, and I amcontent with the narrowest metes and bounds provided I have peace and quiet for work. — Stefan Zweig

It is better to be the servant of God than the ruler of men. — Stefan Zweig

Of course, in the reality of history, the Machiavellian view which glorifies the principle of violence has been able to dominate.Not the compromising conciliatory politics of humaneness, not the Erasmian, but rather the politics of vested power which firmly exploits every opportunity, politics in the sense of the "Principe," has determined the development of European history ever since. — Stefan Zweig

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. — Stefan Zweig

I am not fooling myself with dreams of immortality, know how relative all literature is, don't have any faith in mankind, derive enjoyment from too few things. Sometimes these crises give birth to something worth while, sometimes they simply plunge one deeper into depression, but, of course, it is all part of the same thing. — Stefan Zweig

Being sent to bed is a terrible command to all children, because it means the most public possible humiliation in front of adults, the confession that they bear the stigma of childhood, of being small and having a child's need for sleep. — Stefan Zweig

One only makes books in order to keep in touch with one's fellows after one has ceased to breath, and thus to defend oneself against the inexorable fate of all that lives - transitoriness and oblivion. — Stefan Zweig

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 — Stefan Zweig

When one does another person an injustice, in some mysterious way it does one good to discover (or to persuade oneself) that the injured party has also behaved badly or unfairly in some little matter or other; it is always a relief to the conscience if one can apportion some measure of guilt to the person one has betrayed. — Stefan Zweig

On the whole, more men had perhaps escaped into the war than from it. — Stefan Zweig

It is usual for a woman, even though she may ardently desire to give herself to a man, to feign reluctance, to simulate alarm or indignation. She must be brought to consent by urgent pleading, by lies, adjurations, and promises. I know that only professional prostitutes are accustomed to answer such an invitation with a perfectly frank assent -- prostitutes, or simple-minded, immature girls. — Stefan Zweig

Never is a historic deed already completed when it is done but always only when it is handed down to posterity. What we call "history" by no means represents the sum total of all significant deeds.... World historyonly comprises that tiny lighted sector which chanced to be placed in the spotlight by poetic or scholarly depictions. — Stefan Zweig

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

Pain is a coward. He flees when faced by the irresistible power of the will-to-live, which is more strongly rooted in the flesh than the intensest passion is rooted in the spirit. — Stefan Zweig

Each of us, even the lowliest and most insignificant among us, was uprooted from his innermost existence by the almost constant volcanic upheavals visited upon our European soil and, as one of countless human beings, I can — Stefan Zweig

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. — Stefan Zweig

Only the rare expands our minds, only as we shudder in the face of a new force do our feelings increase. Therefore the extraordinary is always the measure of all greatness. And the creative element always remains the value superior to all others and the mind superior to our minds. — Stefan Zweig

He who studies without passion will never become anything more than a pedant. — Stefan Zweig

Only ambition is fired by the coincidences of success and easy accomplishment but nothing is quite as splendidly uplifting to the heart as the defeat of a human being who battles against the invincible superiority of fate. This is always the most grandiose of all tragedies, one sometimes created by a dramatist but created thousands of times by life. — Stefan Zweig

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

All office workers are afraid of being late for work. — Stefan Zweig

There is nothing that so raises a young man's self-esteem, that so contributes to the formation of his character as for him to find himself unexpectedly confronted with a task which he has to accomplish entirely on his own initiative and by his own efforts. — Stefan Zweig

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. — Stefan Zweig

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

Once shame touches your being at any point, even the most distant nerve is implicated, whether you know it or not; any fleeting encounter or random thought will rake up the anguish and add to it. — Stefan Zweig

But don't despise error. When touched by genius, when led by chance, the most superior truth can come into being from even the most foolish error. The important inventions which have been brought about in every realm of science from false hypotheses number in the hundreds, indeed in the thousands. — Stefan Zweig

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

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. — Stefan Zweig

States of profound happiness, like all other forms of intoxication, are apt to befuddle the wits; intense enjoyment of the present always makes one forget the past. — Stefan Zweig

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. — Stefan Zweig

But nothing is better than a truth which appears not to have the semblance of truth. There is always something incomprehensible about the great heroic deeds performed by humanity because they rise so far beyond the mediocre measure of mere mortals; but it is always only because of the incredible feats that human beings have accomplished that humanity recovers its faith in itself. — Stefan Zweig

He was, like everyone of a strongly erotic disposition, twice as good, twice as much himself when he knew that women liked him, just as many actors find their most ardent vein when they sense that they have cast their spell over the audience, the breathing mass of spectators before them. — Stefan Zweig

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. — Stefan Zweig

As nature requires whirlwinds and cyclones to release its excessive force in a violent revolt against its own existence, so the spirit requires a demonic human being from time to time whose excessive strength rebels against the community of thought and the monotony of moralityonly by looking at those beyond its limits does humanity come to know its own utmost limits. — Stefan Zweig

Something indefinite is always worse than something definite, a strong fear that doesn't last very long is easier than one that's nebulous but doesn't go away. — Stefan Zweig

Besides, isn't it confoundedly easy to think you're a great man if you aren't burdened with the slightest idea that Rembrandt, Beethoven, Dante or Napoleon ever lived? — Stefan Zweig

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

In their overestimation of the role of civilization, the humanists misunderstand the primary forces of the world of primitive human drives with their untamable violence. With their optimistic view of the role of culture, they (the humanists) trivialize the terrifying, hardly solvable problems of mass hatred and of the great passionate psychoses of the human race. — Stefan Zweig

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. — Stefan Zweig

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. — Stefan Zweig

Fate forces its way to the powerful and violent. With subservient obedience it will assume for years dependency on one individual:Caesar, Alexander, Napoleon, because it loves the elemental human being who grows to resemble it, the intangible element. Sometimes, and these are the most astonishing moments in world history, the thread of fate falls into the hands of a complete nobody but only for a twitching minute. — Stefan Zweig

Life Lessons by Stefan Zweig

1. Stefan Zweig teaches us to embrace our own individuality and to be courageous in the face of adversity. He also encourages us to be open to new experiences and to appreciate the beauty of life. Finally, he reminds us to take the time to appreciate the little moments and to strive for balance in our lives.