371 Quotes by Stefan Zweig

My child died last night – and now I shall be alone again, if I must really go on living. They will come tomorrow, strange, hulking, black-clad men bringing a coffin, and they will put him in it, my poor boy, my only child.

How Lilliputian all those anxieties were, how serene that time!

Immer sind die Instinkte wissender als unsere wachen Gedanken.

She wanted, out of a kind of mysterious vindictiveness born of despair, to torture us with her torture, to arraign us, the hale and hearty, in the place of God.

All the bourgeois virtues, caution, obedience, zeal and thoughtfulness- they all melt away powerless in the fire of the great fateful moment that always demands only genius and forms it into a a lasting image. Contemptuously it repulses the timid man; it, another god of the earth, with fiery arms, lifts only the bold into the heaven of heroes.

I realized that there was no point in denying oneself a pleasure because it was denied another, in refusing to allow oneself to be happy because someone else was unhappy.

Mr. Zweig always encouraged his friends to set down their reminiscences, not necessarily for publication but for the pleasure and benefit of their children, their families. In his opinion every life includes inner or external experiences worthy of record.

I will tell you the whole story of my life, and it is a life that truly began only on the day I met you. Before that, there was nothing but murky confusion into which my memory never dipped again, some kind of cellar full of dusty, cobwebbed, sombre objects and people.

He had no taste for his own company and avoided such an encounter as much as possible, for the last thing he wanted was to make close acquaintance with himself.