371 Quotes by Stefan Zweig

Never have I experienced in a people and in myself so powerful a surge of life as at that period when our very existence and survival were at stake.

See, that’s what we’re like. You’re brave and you’re not afraid to die, but you’re afraid of being late for work. That’s how enslaved we are, that’s how ingrained it is.

Perhaps only those who are strangers to passion know such sudden outbursts of emotion in their few passionate moments, moments of emotion like an avalanche or a hurricane; whole years fall from one’s own breast with the fury of powers left unused.

It is generally accepted that getting rich is the only and typical goal of the Jew. Nothing could be further from the truth. Riches are to him merely a stepping stone, a means to the true end, and in no sense the real goal. The real determination of the Jew is to rise to a higher cultural plane in the intellectual world.

Has this new dress, this new world made me so different? Or was this inside me all along, and I was just too fainthearted, too timid? That’s what Mother always said. Maybe everything’s not so hard, maybe life is so much easier than I thought, you just need courage, you just need to have a sense of yourself, then you’ll discover your hidden resources.

But this first installation was by no means the last. Every year the Queen had some new fancy for beautifying her miniature kingdom with more highly artificial and more “natural” additions and alterations.

And once again I feel, in horror, how weak, poor and flabby a substance whatever we call by the names of soul, spirit or feeling must be after all, not to mention what we describe as pain, since all this, even to the utmost degree, is insufficient to destroy the suffering flesh of the tormented body entirely – for we do survive such hours and our blood continues to pulse, instead of dying and falling like a tree struck by lightning.“...

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?

Even if I had gone further than in all honesty I should have done, my lies, those lies born of pity, had made her happy; and to make a person happy could never be a crime.