Stefan Zweig idézet

oldal 3

“If you are going to sell yourself, you should at least get a good price.”

“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.”

“Nothing moves young people so much as to witness a sublime and virile gloom. Michelangelo's thinker staring down into the abyss of his own thoughts, Beethoven's poignantly drawn lips; these tragical masks of universal suffering touch the crude emotions of youth far more than Mozart's silver melodies or the crystalline light that radiates from Leonardo's figures. Being itself beauty, youth has no need of transfiguration. In the superabundance of its vital forces, it is allured by the tragical, and in its inexperience, is prone to accept the embraces of melancholy. That, too, is why youth is always ready for danger, and ever willing to extend a brotherly hand towards mental pain.”

“It is never until one realizes that one means something to others that one feels there is any point or purpose in one's own existence.”

“To the young, what can be more disturbing, what more unsettling and tantalizing, than the play of vague suspicions? The fancy, ceasing to wander in the void, concentrates upon a definite aim, and luxuriates in the febrile pleasures of the chase.”

“He who studies without passion will never become anything more than a pedant. We must approach knowledge from the inside; inspired by passion.”

“The sight of a wedding always has a disturbing effect on young girls; at such moments a mysterious sense of solidarity with their own sex takes possession of them.”

“Someone who's on top of the world isn't much of an observer: happy people are poor psychologists. But someone who's troubled about something is on the alert. The perceived threat sharpens his senses - he takes in more than he usually does.”

“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.”

“A doctor should never try to cure the incurable.”

“It is a blessing not yet to have acquired that over-keen, diagnostic, misanthropic eye, and to be able to look at people and things trustfully when one first sees them.”

“People who are so much at the mercy of their moods should never be given serious responsibilities.”

“One can run away from anything but oneself.”

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

“Supreme achievement and outstanding capacity are only rendered possible by mental concentration, by a sublime monomania that verges on lunacy.”

“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.”

“There's an inherent limit to the stress that any material can bear. Water has its boiling point, metals their melting points. The elements of the spirit behave the same way. Happiness can reach a pitch so great that any further happiness can't be felt. Pain, despair, humiliation, disgust, and fear are no different. Once the vessel is full, the world can't add to it.”

“It always demands a far greater degree of courage for an individual to oppose an organized movement than to let himself be carried along with the stream — individual courage, that is, a variety of courage that is dying out in these times of progressive organization and mechanization. During the war practically the only courage I ran across was mass courage, the courage that comes of being one of a herd, and anyone who examines this phenomenon more closely will find it to be compounded of some very strange elements: a great deal of vanity, a great deal of fear — yes, fear of staying behind, fear of being sneered at fear of independent action, and fear, above all, of taking up a stand against the mass enthusiasm of one's fellows.”

“We live through myriads of seconds, but there is only one second among all these myriads which brings our whole inner world to the boil; the second in which, as Stendhal described, there suddenly takes place a crystallization in the supersaturated blood; a magical second like that of procreation, and, like it, hidden in the warm interior of one's own body, invisible, intangible, impalpable, a unique experience of mystery. No algebra of the soul can calculate it; no alchemy can divine it. Usually, even for ourselves, it remains unsearchable.”

“All office workers are afraid of being late for work.”

“The dressmaker doesn't have problems unless the dress has to hide rather than reveal.”

“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.”

“There are two kinds of pity. One, the weak and sentimental kind, which is really no more than the heart's impatience to be rid as quickly as possible of the painful emotion aroused by the sight of another's unhappiness, that pity which is not compassion, but only an instinctive desire to fortify one's own soul agains the sufferings of another; and the other, the only one at counts, the unsentimental but creative kind, which knows what it is about and is determined to hold out, in patience and forbearance, to the very limit of its strength and even beyond.”

“Was it not the most wonderful thing on earth to be able to help one's fellow-creatures? I now knew that it was the only thing that was worth while.”

“Those whom fate has dealt hard knocks remain vulnerable for ever afterwards.”

“On the whole, more men had perhaps escaped into the war than from it.”

“Names have a mysterious transforming power. Like a ring on a finger, a name may at first seem merely accidental, committing you to nothing; but before you realize its magical power, it's gotten under your skin, become part of you and your destiny.”

“In times of exceptional stress, nature will often give people's behavior so tragical a complexion that neither a picture nor a verbal description is competent to represent its titanic energy.”

“Memory is so corrupt that you remember only what you want to; if you want to forget about something, slowly but surely you do.”