Quotes from Stefan Zweig

Art can bring us consolation as individuals," he said, "but it is powerless against reality.

Formerly man had only a body and a soul. Now he needs a passport as well for without it he will not be treated like a human being.

Los libros sólo se escriben para, por encima del propio aliento, unir a los seres humanos, y así defendernos frente al inexorable reverso de toda existencia: la fugacidad y el olvido

He was, like everyone of a strongly erotic disposition, twice as good, twice as much himself when he knew that women liked him, just as many actors find their most ardent vein when they sense that they have cast their spell over the audience, the breathing mass of spectators before them.

The more one limits oneself, the closer one is to the infinite; these people, as unworldly as they seem, burrow like termites into their own particular material to construct, in miniature, a strange and utterly individual image of the world

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.

They did nothing—other than subjecting us to complete nothingness. For, as is well known, nothing on earth puts more pressure on the human mind than nothing.

Forget it all, I told myself, escape into your mind and your work, into the place where you are only your living, breathing self, not a citizen of any state, not a stake in that infernal game, the place where only what reason you have can still work to some reasonable effect in a world gone mad.

Ä°nsan sabahtan akÅŸama kadar bir ÅŸey olmas?n? bekler ve hiçbir ÅŸey olmaz. Bekleyip durur insan. Hiçbir ÅŸey olmaz. Ä°nsan bekler, bekler, bekler, ÅŸakaklar? zonklayana dek düÅŸünür, düÅŸünür, düÅŸünür. Hiçbir ÅŸey olmaz. Ä°nsan yaln?z kal?r. Yaln?z. Yaln?z.

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.

Mais je t'attendais, je t'attendais, je t'attendais comme mon destin...

Beware of pity.

Aber jeder Schatten ist im letzen doch auch Kind des Lichts, und nur wer Helles und Dunkles, Krieg und Frieden, Aufstieg und Niedergang erfahren, nur der hat wahrhaft gelebt.

One only makes books in order to keep in touch with one's fellows after one has ceased to breath, and thus to defend oneself against the inexorable fate of all that lives - transitoriness and oblivion.

Maybe everything's not so hard, maybe life is so much easier than I thought, you just need courage, you just need to have a sense of yourself, then you'll discover your hidden resources.

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.

I realized that there was no point in denying oneself a pleasure because it was denied another, in refusing to allow oneself to be happy because someone else was unhappy.

Plus un esprit se limite, plus il touche par ailleurs à l'infini.

Bütün yontulmam?? varl?klarda olduÄŸu gibi onda da gülünç bir kendini beÄŸenmiÅŸlik vard?.

But love truly becomes love only when, no longer an embryo developing painfully in the darkness of the body, it ventures to confess itself with lips and breath. However hard it tries to remain a chrysalis, a time comes when the intricate tissue of the cocoon tears, and out it falls, dropping from the heights to the farthest depths, falling with redoubled force into the startled heart.

But I see nothing miraculous about it. Nothing makes one as healthy as happiness, and there is no greater happiness than making someone else happy.

He sensed the presence of death, he sensed the presence of undying love: something broke open inside him, and he thought of the invisible woman, incorporeal and passionate, as one might think of distant music.

For the more a man restricts himself the closer he is, conversely, to infinity.

I had learned and written too much history not to know that the great masses always and at once respond to the force of gravity in the direction of the powers that be. I knew that the same voices which yelled "Heil Schuschnigg" today would thunder "Heil Hitler" tomorrow.