Stefan Zweig: Citations en anglais (Page 3)

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

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Stefan Zweig livre Vingt-quatre heures de la vie d'une femme

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

“Everywhere soldiering entails the same busily empty monotony; hour after hour is mapped out in accordance with inflexible, antediluvian regulations, and even one's leisure does not seem to offer much in the way of variety. In the officers' mess the same faces, the same conversation; at the cafe the same games of cards and billiards.”

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Stefan Zweig livre La Pitié dangereuse

Beware of Pity (1939)

“He looked at her again, now with the vague abject shyness that older men often have with young women, as though asking their indulgence for no longer being young.”

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Stefan Zweig livre The Post Office Girl

The Post Office Girl (published posthumously in 1982)

“There is nothing that so raises a young man's self-esteem, that so contributes to the formation of his character as for him to find himself unexpectedly confronted with a task which he has to accomplish entirely on his own initiative and by his own efforts.”

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Stefan Zweig livre La Pitié dangereuse

Beware of Pity (1939)

“The union of opposites, in so far as they are really complementary, always results in the most perfect harmony; and the seemingly incongruous is often the most natural.”

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Stefan Zweig livre La Pitié dangereuse

Beware of Pity (1939)

“Only ambition is fired by the coincidences of success and easy accomplishment but nothing is quite as splendidly uplifting to the heart as the defeat of a human being who battles against the invincible superiority of fate. This is always the most grandiose of all tragedies, one sometimes created by a dramatist but created thousands of times by life.”

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Stefan Zweig

Stellar Moments in Human History [Sternstunden der Menschheit] (1953), p. 280, as translated by Marion Sonnenfeld

“When one does another person an injustice, in some mysterious way it does one good to discover (or to persuade oneself) that the injured party has also behaved badly or unfairly in some little matter or other; it is always a relief to the conscience if one can apportion some measure of guilt to the person one has betrayed.”

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Stefan Zweig livre La Pitié dangereuse

Beware of Pity (1939)

“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.”

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Stefan Zweig livre The Post Office Girl

The Post Office Girl (published posthumously in 1982)

“There is no understanding of the past without personal experience, without reliving it in imagination. A word is nothing unless it has values and an atmosphere, unless you grasp its historical significance.”

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Stefan Zweig

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

“Once shame touches your being at any point, even the most distant nerve is implicated, whether you know it or not; any fleeting encounter or random thought will rake up the anguish and add to it.”

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Stefan Zweig livre The Post Office Girl

The Post Office Girl (published posthumously in 1982)

“Our decisions are to a much greater extent dependent on our desire to conform to the standards of our class and environment than we are inclined to admit. A considerable proportion of our reasoning is merely an automatic function, so to speak, of influences and impressions which have become part of us, and anyone who has been brought up from childhood in the stern school of military discipline is particularly apt to succumb to the hypnotic and compulsive force exercised by an order of word of command; a force which is logically entirely incomprehensible and which irresistibly undermines his will. In the straitjacket of a uniform, even though fully aware of their absurdity, an officer will carry out his instructions lie a sleep-walker, unresistingly and almost unconsciously.”

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Stefan Zweig livre La Pitié dangereuse

Beware of Pity (1939)

“The heart is able to bury deep and well what is urgently desires to forget.”

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Stefan Zweig livre La Pitié dangereuse

Beware of Pity (1939)

“For one who is having no personal experience, the passionate disquiet of others is at any rate a titillation of the nerves, like seeing a play or listening to music.”

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Stefan Zweig livre Vingt-quatre heures de la vie d'une femme

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

“When a man has a passion for a woman, and when that passion is of such a nature that he regards her with reverent admiration as an image of purity, none the less, in the unconscious, his desires turn towards bodily fulfillment, none the less the goal of physical possession is prefigured in the deepest recesses of his imagination. But when the passion is confined to the realm of the spirit, and, in that realm, is a man's passion for a man, how can it seek fulfillment? Unrestingly, the fancy wanders over the honored form, flaming up again and again to fresh ecstasy, but never finding repose in a last surrender. It flows on without pause in a current that can never empty the reservoir from which it comes. This passion is insatiable, as the spirit invariably is.”

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Stefan Zweig

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

“To grow old means to be rid of anxieties about the past.”

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Stefan Zweig livre Vingt-quatre heures de la vie d'une femme

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

“It is only at first that pity, like morphine, is a solace to the invalid, a remedy, a drug, but unless you know the correct dosage and when to stop, it becomes a virulent poison. The first few injections do good, they soothe, they deaden the pain. But the devil of it is that the organism, the body, just like the soul, has an uncanny capacity for adaptation. Just as the nervous system cries out for more and more morphine, so do the emotions cry out for more and more pity, in the end more than one can give. Inevitably there comes a moment when one has to say 'no', and then one must not mind the other person's hating one more for this ultimate refusal than if one had never helped him at all. Yes, my dear Lieutenant, one has got to keep one's pity properly in check, or it does far more harm than any amount of indifference — we doctors know that, and so do judges and myrmidons of the law and pawn-brokers; if they were all to give way to their pity, this world of ours would stand still - a dangerous thing pity, a dangerous thing!”

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Stefan Zweig livre La Pitié dangereuse

Beware of Pity (1939)

“Pain is a coward. He flees when faced by the irresistible power of the will-to-live, which is more strongly rooted in the flesh than the intensest passion is rooted in the spirit.”

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Stefan Zweig livre Vingt-quatre heures de la vie d'une femme

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

“As we grow old, we become aware that death is drawing near; his shadow falls across our path; the realities of life seem less crude than of yore, they touch our senses less intimately, and they lose much of their poignancy.”

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Stefan Zweig livre Vingt-quatre heures de la vie d'une femme

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

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

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Stefan Zweig livre The Post Office Girl

The Post Office Girl (published posthumously in 1982)

“A man of limited vision is hard to bear with in any sphere in which he is invested with power, but intolerable in the army.”

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Stefan Zweig livre La Pitié dangereuse

Beware of Pity (1939)