"Health alone does not suffice. To be happy, to become creative, man must always be strengthened by faith in the meaning of his own existence."
Read quote
8 likes
Quote collection
Stefan Zweig quotes (page 4 of 8)
147 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Ah, how fatefully swift is the move from one feeling to another."
Read quote
7 likes
"In their overestimation of the role of civilization, the humanists misunderstand the primary forces of the world of primitive human drives with their untamable violence. With their optimistic view of the role of culture, they (the humanists) trivialize the terrifying, hardly solvable problems of mass hatred and of the great passionate psychoses of the human race."
Read quote
7 likes
"The Battle of Waterloo is a work of art with tension and drama with its unceasing change from hope to fear and back again, changewhich suddenly dissolves into a moment of extreme catastrophe, a model tragedy because the fate of Europe was determined within this individual fate."
Read quote
7 likes
"A word is nothing unless it has values and an atmosphere, unless you grasp its historical significance."
Read quote
7 likes
"Never can the innate power of a work be hidden or locked away. A work of art can be forgotten by time; it can be forbidden and rejected but the elemental will always prevail over the ephemeral."
Read quote
7 likes
"Fate is never too generous even to its favorites. Rarely do the gods grant a mortal more than one immortal deed."
Read quote
7 likes
"And fate? No one alive has ever escaped it, neither brave man nor coward, I tell you-- it's born with us the day that we are born."
Read quote
7 likes
"Today, for a Jew who writes in the German language, it is totally impossible to make a living. In no group do I see as much misery, disappointment, desperation and hopelessness as in Jewish writers who write in German."
Read quote
7 likes
"for the more a man restricts himself the closer he is, conversely, to infinity."
Read quote
6 likes
"Everything in life that deviates from the straight and, so to speak, normal line, makes people first curious and then indignant."
Read quote
6 likes
"The dressmaker doesn't have problems unless the dress has to hide rather than reveal."
Read quote
6 likes
"There is no sense to a sacrifice after you come to feel that it is a sacrifice."
Read quote
6 likes
"But the creative person is subject to a different, higher law than mere national law. Whoever has to create a work, whoever has tobring about a discovery or deed which will further the cause of all of humanity, no longer has his home in his native land but rather in his work."
Read quote
6 likes
"Erasmus was the light of his century; others were its strength: he lighted the way; others knew how to walk on it while he himselfremained in the shadow as the source of light always does. But he who points the way into a new era is no less worthy of veneration than he who is the first to enter it; those who work invisibly have also accomplished a feat."
Read quote
6 likes
"It is better to pay tribute of gold to the enemy than tribute of blood in war."
Read quote
6 likes
"The greater part of our best years has been passed for our generation in these two great worldconvulsions. All will be changed after this war, which spends in one month more than nations earned before in yearsthere is no more security in our time than in those of the Reformation or the fall of Rome."
Read quote
6 likes
"Fate forces its way to the powerful and violent. With subservient obedience it will assume for years dependency on one individual:Caesar, Alexander, Napoleon, because it loves the elemental human being who grows to resemble it, the intangible element. Sometimes, and these are the most astonishing moments in world history, the thread of fate falls into the hands of a complete nobody but only for a twitching minute."
Read quote
6 likes
"Through suffering we have endured the assaults of time; reverses have ever been our beginning; and out of the depths God has gathered us to his heart."
Read quote
6 likes
"(Heinrich von) Kleist would not be a Prussian if his first thought would not have been orderlinessand he would not be a German if he had not placed all his hopes of developing this inner orderliness into education. Education is the secret of life for him as for every German: studying, learning a lot from books, sitting in lectures, keeping notebooks, listening intently to professors."
Read quote
6 likes