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

„Something indefinite is always worse than something definite, a strong fear that doesn't last very long is easier than one that's nebulous but doesn't go away.“

—  Stefan Zweig, book The Post Office Girl

The Post Office Girl (published posthumously in 1982)

„The subject of a rumor is always the last to hear it.“

—  Stefan Zweig, book The Post Office Girl

The Post Office Girl (published posthumously in 1982)

„The word 'service' comes from serving, and serving means being dependent.“

—  Stefan Zweig, book Beware of Pity

Beware of Pity (1939)

„Whatever a woman's reason may say, her feelings tell her the truth.“

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

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

„Hairdressers are professional gossips; when only the hands are busy, the tongue is seldom still.“

—  Stefan Zweig, book The Post Office Girl

The Post Office Girl (published posthumously in 1982)

„Adultery is in most cases a theft in the dark. At such moments almost every woman betrays her husband's innermost secrets; becomes a Delilah who discloses to a stranger, discloses to her lover, the mysteries of her husband's strength or weakness. What seems to me treason is, not that women give themselves, but that a woman is prone, when she does so, to justify herself to herself by uncovering her husband's nakedness, exposing it to the inquisitive and scornful gaze of a stranger.“

—  Stefan Zweig

Confusion of Feelings or Confusion: The Private Papers of Privy Councillor R. Von D (1927)