Stefan Zweig Quotes

The heart is able to bury deep and well what is urgently desires to forget.

It is not the healthy, the confident, the proud, the joyous, the happy, that one must love - they have no need of one's love! Arrogant and indifferent, they accept love only as homage that is theirs to command, as their due. The devotion of another is to them a mere embellishment, an ornament for the hair, a bracelet on the arm, not the whole meaning and bliss of their lives. Only those with whom life has dealt hardly, the wretched, the slighted, the uncertain, the unlovely, the humiliated, could really be helped by love. He who devotes his life to them atones to them for what life has taken from them. They alone know how to love and be loved as one should love - gratefully and humbly.

Our decisions are to a much greater extent dependent on our desire to conform to the standards of our class and environment than we are inclined to admit. A considerable proportion of our reasoning is merely an automatic function, so to speak, of influences and impressions which have become part of us, and anyone who has been brought up from childhood in the stern school of military discipline is particularly apt to succumb to the hypnotic and compulsive force exercised by an order of word of command; a force which is logically entirely incomprehensible and which irresistibly undermines his will. In the straitjacket of a uniform, even though fully aware of their absurdity, an officer will carry out his instructions lie a sleep-walker, unresistingly and almost unconsciously.

A human being will accept the strictest disciplinary measures with a better grace if he knows that they will fall with equal severity on his neighbor. Justice in some mysterious way makes up for violence.

A man of limited vision is hard to bear with in any sphere in which he is invested with power, but intolerable in the army.

The feeling of self-assurance derived from physical achievement always transfers itself to the mental sphere.

In my youth and comparative inexperience I had always regarded the yearning and pangs of love as the worst torture that could afflict the human heart. At this moment, however, I began to realize that there was another and perhaps grimmer torture than that of longing and desiring: that of being loved against one's will and of being unable to defend oneself against the urgency of another's passion; of seeing another human being seared by the flame of her desire and of having to look impotently, lacking the power, the capacity, the strength to pluck her from the flames. He who is himself crossed in love is able from time to time to master his passion, for he is not the creature but the creator of his own misery; and if a lover is unable to control his passim, he at least knows that he is himself to blame for his sufferings.

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.

One can run away from anything but oneself.

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

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

Everything in life that deviates from the straight and, so to speak, normal line, makes people first curious and then indignant.

Only a numskull is pleased at being a so-called 'success' with women, only a dunderhead is puffed up by it. A real man is much more likely to be dismayed at realizing that a woman has lost her heart to him when he can't reciprocate her feelings.

Why is it that the stupidest people are always the most good-natured?

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