Stefan Zweig: Making

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

“Confidences are always risky: a secret entrusted to a stranger make him less of one. You've given away something of yourself, given him the advantage.”

“A human being will accept the strictest disciplinary measures with a better grace if he knows that they will fall with equal severity on his neighbor. Justice in some mysterious way makes up for violence.”

“Anger makes one not only malign but sharp-sighted.”

“And I said to myself: From now on help anyone and everyone so far as it lies within your power. Cease to be apathetic, indifferent! Exalt yourself by devoting yourself to others, enrich yourself by making everyone's destiny your own, by enduring and understanding every facet of human suffering through your pity. And my heart, astonished at its own workings, quivered with gratitude to the sick girl whom I had hurt unwittingly and who, through her suffering, had taught me the creative magic of pity.”

“My father was a schoolmaster in a little North German town, and for the very reason that at home culture was a means of livelihood, I detested learning and literature from childhood onwards. That is nature's way. In pursuance of her mysterious design to safeguard the creative faculty, she is apt to make children scorn their father's bent. She does not want to encourage an easy, effortless acceptance of a heritage, a mere handing down of acquisitions from one generation to the next. She sows the seeds of discord, and will only allow children to follow in their parent's footsteps after they have made laborious but fruitful detours.”

“Unhappiness makes people vulnerable, incessant suffering unjust. Just as in the relations between a creditor and a debtor there is always an element of the disagreeable that can never be overcome, for the very reason that the one is irrevocably committed to the role of giver and the other to that of receiver, so in a sick person a latent feeling of resentment at every obvious sign of consideration is always ready to burst forth.”

“The soul is made of stuff so mysteriously elastic that a single event can make it big enough to contain the infinite.”

“Nothing makes you madder than wanting to defend yourself against something you can't even get hold of, something the human race is doing to you, but still there's nobody you can grab by the throat.”

“The instinct for self-deception in human beings makes them try to banish from their minds dangers of which at bottom they are perfectly aware by declaring them non-existent.”

“States of profound happiness, like all other forms of intoxication, are apt to befuddle the wits; intense enjoyment of the present always makes one forget the past.”

“Ever since the war he's had a low opinion of people and of nations, they're selfish, all of them, without the imagination to see the injustices they're perpetrating. The idealism of his youth, a belief in the moral mission of mankind and the enlightened spirit of the white race that he took from the lectures of John Stuart Mill and his followers, was buried once and for all in the bloody mire of Ypres and the chalk quarry at Soissons where his son met his death. Politics disgusts him, the cool conviviality of the club and the showy self-congratulation of the public banquet repel him; since the death of his son he's avoided making new acquaintances. His own generation's sour unwillingness to recognize the truth and its inability to adapt to the postwar era anger him, as does the younger generation's smart-alecky thoughtlessness. But with this girl he's regained belief, a vague devout gratitude for the mere existence of youth; in her presence he sees that one generation's painfully acquired mistrust of life is fortunately neither understood nor credited by the next, and that each new wave of youth is a new beginning.”