Stefan Zweig quotes

„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, book The Post Office Girl

The Post Office Girl (published posthumously in 1982)

„The vast power of money, mighty when you have it and even mightier when you don't, with its divine gift of freedom and the demonic fury it unleashes on those forced to do without it — they felt this as never before and were filled with bitter rage when, in the dark of the early morning, they saw the brightly lit windows and knew that those glowing gold curtains gave shelter and freedom to hundreds of thousands of people, men with women they desired, while they themselves were homeless, plodding blindly through the streets, through the rain; it was cruel as only the sea could be cruel — the sea in which a person can die of thirst.“

—  Stefan Zweig, book The Post Office Girl

The Post Office Girl (published posthumously in 1982)

„Besides, isn't it confoundedly easy to think you're a great man if you aren't burdened with the slightest idea that Rembrandt, Beethoven, Dante or Napoleon ever lived?“

—  Stefan Zweig

Source: Chess Story

„Time to leave now, get out of this room, go somewhere, anywhere; sharpen this feeling of happiness and freedom, stretch your limbs, fill your eyes, be awake, wider awake, vividly awake in every sense and every pore.“

—  Stefan Zweig

Source: The Post-Office Girl

„Nothing whets the intelligence more than a passionate suspicion, nothing develops all the faculties of an immature mind more than a trail running away into the dark.“

—  Stefan Zweig

Source: The Burning Secret and other stories

„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.“

—  Stefan Zweig

Source: The Burning Secret and other stories

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

—  Stefan Zweig, book Beware of Pity

Source: Beware of Pity (1939)

„How terrible this darkness was, how bewildering, and yet mysteriously beautiful!“

—  Stefan Zweig

Source: The Burning Secret and other stories

„All I know is that I shall be alone again. There is nothing more terrible than to be alone among human beings.“

—  Stefan Zweig

Source: Letter from an Unknown Woman: The Fowler Snared

„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.“

—  Stefan Zweig

Source: Chess Story

„In this instant, shaken to her very depths, this ecstatic human being has a first inkling that the soul is made of stuff so mysteriously elastic that a single event can make it big enough to contain the infinite.“

—  Stefan Zweig

Source: The Post-Office Girl

„Freedom is not possible without authority - otherwise it would turn into chaos and authority is not possible without freedom - otherwise it would turn into tyranny.“

—  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.“

—  Stefan Zweig

Source: The Burning Secret and other stories

„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

The World of Yesterday [Die Welt von Gestern] (1942), p. 10, as translated by Marion Sonnenfeld

„Gratitude is a rare frame of mind; and those who are grateful can seldom find a way to express what they feel. They are overwhelmed by silence; are shamefaced; and, sometimes, actually try to hide their feelings.“

—  Stefan Zweig, book Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman

Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman (1927)

„No envy is more mean than that of small-minded beings when they see a neighbor lifted, as though borne aloft by angels, out of the dull drudgery of their common existence; petty spirits are more ready to forgive a prince the most fabulous wealth than a fellow-sufferer beneath the same yoke the smallest degree of freedom.“

—  Stefan Zweig, book Beware of Pity

Beware of Pity (1939)

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

—  Stefan Zweig, book Beware of Pity

Beware of Pity (1939)

„I have loved you ever since. I know full well that you are used to hearing women say that they love you. But I am sure that no one else has ever loved you so lavishly, with such doglike fidelity, with such devotion, as I did and do. Nothing can equal the unnoticed love of a child. It is hopeless and subservient; it is patient and passionate; it is something which the covetous love of a grown woman, the love that is unconsciously exacting, can never be. Non but lonely children can cherish such a passion. The others will squander their feelings in companionship, will dissipate them in confidential talks. They have heard and read much of love, and they know that it comes to all. They play with it like a toy; they flaunt it as a boy flaunts his first cigarette. But I had no confidant; I had been neither taught nor warned; I was inexperience and unsuspecting.“

—  Stefan Zweig, book Letter from an Unknown Woman

Letter from an Unknown Woman (1922)

„After experiencing profound emotions, one sleeps profoundly.“

—  Stefan Zweig, book Beware of Pity

Beware of Pity (1939)