Stefan Zweig quotes

Stefan Zweig was an Austrian writer, playwright, and biographer widely admired for his psychological insight. His works, including novellas, essays, and biographies, gained international popularity in the early twentieth century. He became known for exploring the complexities of the human soul and for his poignant reflections on European culture. Here are 116 of his quotes:

One can run away from anything but oneself.

Stefan Zweig

Only a numskull is pleased at being a so-called 'success' with women, only a dunderhead is puffed up by it. A real man is much more likely to be dismayed at realizing that a woman has lost her heart to him when he can't reciprocate her feelings.

Stefan Zweig

Confidences are always risky: a secret entrusted to a stranger make him less of one. You've given away something of yourself, given him the advantage.

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

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

Adultery is in most cases a theft in the dark. At such moments almost every woman betrays her husband's innermost secrets; becomes a Delilah who discloses to a stranger, discloses to her lover, the mysteries of her husband's strength or weakness. What seems to me treason is, not that women give themselves, but that a woman is prone, when she does so, to justify herself to herself by uncovering her husband's nakedness, exposing it to the inquisitive and scornful gaze of a stranger.

Stefan Zweig

In some mysterious way, once one has gained an insight into human nature, that insight grows from day to day, and he to whom it has given to experience vicariously even one single form of earthly suffering acquires, by reason of this tragic lesson, an understanding of all its forms, even those most foreign to him, and apparently abnormal.

Stefan Zweig

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

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

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

Stefan Zweig

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

Stefan Zweig

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

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

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

Stefan Zweig

All the pale horses of the apocalypse have stormed through my life, revolution, starvation, devaluation of currency and terror, epidemics, emigration; I have seen the great ideologies of the masses grow and spread out before my eyes. Fascism in Italy, National Socialism in Germany, Bolshevism in Russia, and, above all, that archpestilence, nationalism, which poisoned our flourishing European culture.

Stefan Zweig

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

Stefan Zweig

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

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

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

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

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

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