Stefan Zweig quotes - page 2

To grow old means to be rid of anxieties about the past. (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. View quote
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. View quote
Stefan Zweig
The subject of a rumor is always the last to hear it. View quote
Stefan Zweig
If you are going to sell yourself, you should at least get a good price. View quote
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. View quote
Stefan Zweig
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. View quote
Stefan Zweig
All office workers are afraid of being late for work. View quote
Stefan Zweig
The dressmaker doesn't have problems unless the dress has to hide rather than reveal. View quote
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. View quote
Stefan Zweig
Those whom fate has dealt hard knocks remain vulnerable for ever afterwards. (Stefan Zweig)
On the whole, more men had perhaps escaped into the war than from it. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Stefan Zweig
There is nothing more vindictive, nothing more underhanded, than a little world that would like to be a big one. View quote
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. View quote
Stefan Zweig
Life is futile unless it be directed towards a definite goal. View quote
Stefan Zweig
Long-protracted suffering is apt to exhaust not only the invalid, but the compassion of others; violent emotions cannot be prolonged endlessly. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Stefan Zweig
There are two kinds of pity. One, the weak and sentimental kind, which is really no more than the heart's impatience to be rid as quickly as possible of the painful emotion aroused by the sight of another's unhappiness, that pity which is not compassion, but only an instinctive desire to fortify one's own soul agains the sufferings of another; and the other, the only one at counts, the unsentimental but creative kind, which knows what it is about and is determined to hold out, in patience and forbearance, to the very limit of its strength and even beyond. (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. View quote
Stefan Zweig
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. View quote
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. View quote
Stefan Zweig
The only respect in which man is superior to animals is that he can die when he wants to, not just when he has to. Maybe it's the one freedom you can always count on - the freedom to throw your life away. View quote
Stefan Zweig