Quotes from Stefan Zweig

What decides whether a man will become immortal, is not his character but his vitality. Nothing save intensity confers immortality. A man manifests himself more vividly, in proportion as he is strong and unified, effective and unique. Immortality knows nothing of morality or immorality, of good or evil; it measures only work and strength; it demands from a man not purity but unity. Here, morality is nothing; intensity, all.

Two suitcases, in one the wardrobe, the earthly essentials, in the other- manuscripts, the spiritual supplies, then you are at home everywhere-Zweig GW Tagebuecher p. 383

the natural animosity between those who slept and those who were stirring in the sleeping city.

je mehr sich einer begrenzt, um so mehr ist er andererseits dem Unendlichen nah; gerade solche scheinbar Weltabseitigen bauen in ihrer besonderen Materie sich termitenhaft eine merkwürdige und durchaus einmalige Abbreviatur der Welt.

La gratitud nos hace felices porque son raras las ocasiones en que se nos hace visible; toda delicadeza nos produce un efecto saludable, y para mí, naturaleza fría y mesurada, aquella superabundancia de sentimiento significaba algo nuevo, agradable y felicísimo.

For tradition also and always means inhibition.

My child died last night—and now I shall be alone again, if I must really go on living. They will come tomorrow, strange, hulking, black-clad men bringing a coffin, and they will put him in it, my poor boy, my only child.

And the child—your child—was born there in the midst of misery. It was a deadly place: strange, everything was strange, we women lying there were strange to each other, lonely and hating one another out of misery, the same torment in that crowded ward full of chloroform and blood, screams and groans.

Cómo vivían al margen de todas las crisis y los problemas que oprimen el corazón, pero a la vez lo ensanchan!

In history as in human life, regret does not bring back a lost moment and a thousand years will not recover something lost in a single hour.

Pity, like morphine, does the sick good only at first. It is a means of helping them to feel better, but if you don't get the dose right and know where to stop it becomes a murderous poison.

Ä°stedigimiz ve bizi mutlu eden bir hayat? m? ya??yoruz yoksa istenilen ve çevremizdekileri mutlu eden bir hayat? m?? Ä°nsanlar?n takdirini kazanmak matah bir ÅŸey mi? Hata sand?klar?m?z gerçek birer hata m??

her first glance at me would be bound to hold the question: have you forgiven me? And perhaps that still more critical question: will you bear with my love, and can you return it? That first moment when she would gaze up with a blush, a look of controlled and yet uncontrollable impatience, might be at once the most hazardous and decisive.

He felt that it was a mistake to look for signs and portents instead of waiting until they were revealed to him in their own good time.

It is generally accepted that getting rich is the only and typical goal of the Jew. Nothing could be further from the truth. Riches are to him merely a stepping stone, a means to the true end, and in no sense the real goal. The real determination of the Jew is to rise to a higher cultural plane in the intellectual world.

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.

Neither she nor he was the same any more, yet they were searching for each other in a vain effort, fleeing one another, persisting in disembodied, powerless efforts like those black spectres at their feet.

The woman who had been born in an imperial palace, and then, as Queen of France, had had hundreds of rooms in her dwelling house, was now imprisoned in a tiny basement cell, its walls streaming with damp, and its grated window half occluded.

The desire to ascend in the social scale does not make itself felt until the intellect awakens. Up to the tenth, and often up to the fifteenth year, almost every child belonging to a well-to-do family envies its proletarian schoolmates, to whom so many things are permissible which for the "respectable" are placed under taboo.

All the bourgeois virtues, caution, obedience, zeal and thoughtfulness- they all melt away powerless in the fire of the great fateful moment that always demands only genius and forms it into a a lasting image. Contemptuously it repulses the timid man; it, another god of the earth, with fiery arms, lifts only the bold into the heaven of heroes.

tokluk da açl?ktan daha az k??k?rt?c? deÄŸildir

No envy is more mean than that of small-minded beings when they see a neighbor lifted, as though borne aloft by angels, out of the dull drudgery of their common existence; petty spirits are more ready to forgive a prince the most fabulous wealth than a fellow-sufferer beneath the same yoke the smallest degree of freedom.

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

Sana bunu anlatmak istedim, çünkü senin, beni hiç tan?mayan senin, bir yaÅŸam?n nas?l sana baÄŸland???n? ve kaybolduÄŸunu nihayet kavramaya baÅŸlaman? istedim.