Quotes by Stefan Zweig

“Every wave, regardless of how high and forceful it crests, must eventually collapse within itself.”

“Only the misfortune of exile can provide the in-depth understanding and the overview into the realities of the world.”

“It would be foolhardy to count on the conscience of the world.”

“Now I am discovering the world once more. England has widened my horizon.”

“Today, as a Jew, one should not have any position or accept any honors because it is difficult to live with those eternal compromises.”

“The idea of Jewish unity, of a plan, an organization, unfortunately exists only in the brains of Hitler and Streicher.”

“Today, for a Jew who writes in the German language, it is totally impossible to make a living. In no group do I see as much misery, disappointment, desperation and hopelessness as in Jewish writers who write in German.”

“The life of our generation is now set. We do not have the power to influence the flow of events, and no right to offer advice to the next generation.”

The strength of a love is always misjudged if we evaluate it by its immediate cause and not the stress that went before it, the dark and hollow space full of disappointment and loneliness that precedes all the great events in the hearts history.

Only the person who has experienced light and darkness, war and peace, rise and fall, only that person has truly experienced life.

Holding a precious book meant to Mendel what an assignment with a woman might to another man. These moments were his platonic nights of love. Books had power over him; money never did. Great collectors, including the founder of a collection in Princeton University Library, tried in vain to recruit him as an adviser and buyer for their libraries—Jakob Mendel declined; no one could imagine him anywhere but in the Café Gluck. Thirty-three years ago, when his beard was still soft and black and he had ringlets over his forehead, he had come from the east to Vienna, a crook-backed lad, to study for the rabbinate, but he had soon abandoned Jehovah the harsh One God to give himself up to idolatry in the form of the brilliant, thousand-fold polytheism of books. That was when he had first found his way to the Café Gluck, and gradually it became his workplace, his headquarters, his post office, his world. Like an astronomer alone in his observatory, studying myriads of stars every night through the tiny round lens of the telescope, observing their mysterious courses, their wandering multitude as they are extinguished and then appear again, so Jakob Mendel looked through his glasses out from that rectangular table into the other universe of books, also eternally circling and being reborn in that world above our own.

Consciously or unconsciously, our education renders us slaves to morals, religion and a perceived vision of the world; our breath is the air of the epoch in which we live.

But you smiled at me and said consolingly, People come back again.Yes I said, they come back, but then they have forgotten.There must have been something odd, something passionate in the way I said that to you. For you rose to your feet as well and looked at me, affectionately and very surprised. You took me by the shoulders. Whats good is not forgotten; I will not forget you, you said, and as you did so you gazed intently at me as if to memorise my image.

For this quiet, unprepossessing, passive man who has no garden in front of his subsidised flat, books are like flowers. He loves to line them up on the shelf in multicoloured rows: he watches over each of them with an old-fashioned gardeners delight, holds them like fragile objects in his thin, bloodless hands.

...My husband made my dreams come true, and because he could do that I married him.Then he says softly, as if to himself, But what about love?She heard that. A slight smile comes to her lips.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? Havent 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?

For the first time I began to perceive that true sympathy cannot be switched on and off like an electric current, that anyone that identifies himself with the fate of another is robbed to some extent of his own freedom.

Nothing whets the intelligence more than a passionate suspicion, nothing develops all the faculties of an immature mind more than a trail running away into the dark.

As everyone knows, it is a thousand times easier to reconstruct the facts of what happened at a certain time than its intellectual atmosphere. The atmosphere is reflected not in official events but, most conspicuously, in small, personal episodes...

The instinct of self-deception in human beings makes them try to banish from their minds dangers of which at the bottom they are perfectly aware by declaring them nonexistent, and a warning such as mine against cheap optimism was bound to prove particularly unwelcome at a moment when a sumptuously laid supper was awaiting for us in the next room.

For the first time in my life I began to realize that it is not evil and brutality, but nearly always weakness, that is to blame for the worst things that happen in this world.