Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig

Writer

Stefan Zweig was an Austrian writer known for his psychological insight and exploration of human emotions, particularly in works like 'The World of Yesterday.'

Men Heart War Hands People Fall
Born
18811942-04-28
Died
February 22, 1942
Quotes
147
Rank
#69

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Stefan Zweig quotes (page 3 of 8)

147 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.

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"He who is himself crossed in love is able from time to time to master his passion, for he is not the creature but the creator of his own misery; and if a lover is unable to control his passion, he at least knows that he is himself to blame for his sufferings. But he who is loved without reciprocating that love is lost beyond redemption, for it is not in his power to set a limit to that other's passion, to keep it within bounds, and the strongest will is reduced to impotence in the face of another's desire."

Love Passion Suffering
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"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."

Strength Character Human Nature
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"Why is it that the stupidest people are always the most good-natured?"

People Stupidest
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"He was welcome everywhere he went, and was well-aware of his inability to tolerate solitude. He felt no inclination to be alone and avoided it as far as possible; he didn't really want to become any better acquainted with himself. He knew that if he wanted to show his talents to best advantage, he needed to strike sparks off other people to fan the flames of warmth and exuberance in his heart. On his own he was frosty, no use to himself at all, like a match left lying in its box."

Lying Heart Flames
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"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."

Errors Numbers Important
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"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."

Opposites Perfect Unions
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"Dostoevsky was the first to reveal to us this teeming multiplicity of emotions, this complexity of our spiritual universe."

Spiritual Firsts Emotion
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"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."

Pain Stress Water
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"Whatever a woman's reason may say, her feelings tell her the truth."

Feelings May Reason
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"Memory is so corrupt that you remember only what you want to; if you want to forget about something, slowly but surely you do."

Memories Want Remember
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"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."

Uplifting Heart Ambition
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"I hadn't had a book in my hands for four months, and the mere idea of a book where I could see words printed one after another, lines, pages, leaves, a book in which I could pursue new, different, fresh thoughts to divert me, could take them into my brain, had something both intoxicating and stupefying about it."

Book Hands Ideas
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"For the more a man limits himself, the nearer he is on the other hand to what is limitless."

Men Hands Limits
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"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."

Fear Mirrors Imagination
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"(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."

Christian Jobs Freedom
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"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."

Memories Long Ago Order
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"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."

Flower Book Men
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"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."

Faith Dream Peace
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