"In history as in human life, regret does not bring back a lost moment and a thousand years will not recover something lost in a single hour."
"Human life is so strangely constituted that even perfected intellectual understanding combined with the richest experience is incapable of conquering innate weaknesses. Even if it thoroughly analyzes itself, psychology (and this is one of the dubious aspects of psychoanalysis) can, to be sure, recognize its flawed native characteristics, but it cannot eliminate them. Understanding (them) is not the same as overcoming (them) and, again and again, we see the wisest of human beings helpless in the fact of their small follies which everyone else observes with a smile."
Source: Stefan Zweig, Friderike Maria Burger Winternitz Zweig, Henry G. Alsberg (1954). “Stefan and Friderike Zweig: their correspondence, 1912-1942”
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