Quotes from Stefan Zweig

and it was the pride and ambition of the Jewish people to co-operate in the front ranks to carry on the former glory of the fame of Viennese culture.

It's not your fault. But whose fault is it? Why are we always the ones who suffer? We didn't do anything, we didn't do anything to anyone, but every step we take is a trap.

I had no witness against me left but my own memory."..

Growing old, after all, means that one no longer fears the past."..

All office workers are afraid of being late for work.

Früher hatte der Mensch nur einen Körper und eine Seele. Heute braucht er noch einen Pass dazu, sonst wird er nicht wie ein Mensch behandelt.

Never have I experienced in a people and in myself so powerful a surge of life as at that period when our very existence and survival were at stake.

Seuls les enfants solitaires peuvent contenir toute leur passion; les autres, à trop causer éventent leurs sentiments en public, les émoussent en vaines confidences.

War does not permit itself to be coordinated with reason and righteousness. It needs stimulated emotions, enthusiasm for its own cause and hatred for the adversary.

This contact with the overpowering is her first encounter with travel's disconcerting ability to strip the hard shell of habit from the heart, leaving only the bare, fertile kernel.

Alors, dans l'obscurité j'ai pleuré de bonheur.

Poverty was crushing all the feeling they had. It was intolerable to be together this way, and yet they tolerated it.

Persistently trying to hoodwink one another, the Emperor, the kings, the princes, and the revolutionaries created an atmosphere of general distrust (like that which poisons the world today); and, in the end, though they had not directly purposed anything of the kind, they involved twenty-five million men in the cataract or a war which lasted for twenty-five years.

One goes wherever one is still admitted. Someone told me that I might be able to get a visa for Haiti or San Domingo here.

Do you still have all the ideals, all the ideals that you took to that distant world with you? Are they all still intact, or have some of them died or withered away? Haven't they been torn out of you by force and flung in the dirt, where thousands of wheels carrying vehicles to their owners' destination in life crushed them? Or have you lost none of them?

See, that's what we're like. You're brave and you're not afraid to die, but you're afraid of being late for work. That's how enslaved we are, that's how ingrained it is.

Tu étais pour moi - comment dirai-je? toute comparaison serait trop faible - tu étais précisément tout pour moi, toute ma vie. Rien n'existait que dans la mesure où cela se rapportait à toi; rien dans mon existence n'avait de sens que si cela me rapprochait de toi. Tu métamorphosais ma façon de vivre.

I am an impatient, temperamental reader. Anything long-winded, high-flown or gushing irritates me, so does everything that is vague and indistinct, in fact anything that unnecessarily holds the reader up, whether in a novel, a biography or an intellectual argument.

Le parece maravilloso verse envuelta por la ardiente muchedumbre, dejarse amar por ese desconocido pueblo; en adelante sigue disfrutando de este amor de veinte millones de criaturas como de un derecho propio, sin sospechar que el derecho impone también deberes y que el amor mas puro acaba por fatigarse si no se siente correspondido.

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.

she was never to be allowed to exchange a word with him; and that she was forbidden to pay him a visit even when he was ailing. He was quarantined from her as if she had been suffering from the plague. She was actually forbidden to converse with Simon the shoemaker, the boy's tutor, from whom she might have gleaned a little information about her son. His seclusion from her was to be unconditional and absolute.

that the whole nation, tired of war, actually only longed for order, quiet, and a little security and bourgeois life. And, secretly it hated the republic, not because it suppressed this wild freedom, but on the contrary, because it held the reins too loosely.

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.

Pero incluso con sus favoritos, el destino no siempre se muestra magnánimo. Rara vez conceden los dioses a los mortales más de una hazaña única e imperecedera.