STEFAN ZWEIG QUOTES IV

Austrian novelist, playwright & journalist (1881-1942)

On the whole, more men had perhaps escaped into the war than from it.

STEFAN ZWEIG

Beware of Pity

Tags: war


Immanuel Kant lived with knowledge as with his lawfully wedded wife, slept with it in the same intellectual bed for forty years and begot an entire German race of philosophical systems.

STEFAN ZWEIG

The Struggle with the Demon

Tags: Immanuel Kant


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 heart's history.

STEFAN ZWEIG

The Burning Secret and Other Stories

Tags: love


Hairdressers are professional gossips; when only the hands are busy, the tongue is seldom still.

STEFAN ZWEIG

The Post Office Girl

Tags: gossip


What is noble, lyrical, tender in the upper level shown is also with the servants, scoundrels, and scamps, as in a distorting mirror. This contrast seems to me a most appealing musical theme--to show love in its noble and crude forms, romanticism and crass realism mixed as in everyday life.

STEFAN ZWEIG

letter to Richard Strauss, Mar. 14, 1935


Boldly, perhaps still warm from human bodies, the unmade double bed bore visible witness to the point and purpose of this room.

STEFAN ZWEIG

Journey Into the Past

Tags: sex


It is precisely those who are apparently aloof from the world who build for themselves a remarkable and thoroughly individual world in miniature, using their own special equipment, termite-like.

STEFAN ZWEIG

Chess Story


Adultery is in most cases a theft in the dark. At such moments almost every woman betrays her husband's innermost secrets; becomes a Delilah who discloses to a stranger, discloses to her lover, the mysteries of her husband's strength or weakness. What seems to me treason is, not that women give themselves, but that a woman is prone, when she does so, to justify herself to herself by uncovering her husband's nakedness, exposing it to the inquisitive and scornful gaze of a stranger.

STEFAN ZWEIG

Confusion of Feelings or Confusion

Tags: adultery


Always the same dream, the same illusion. Night after night, the same terror seizes me, the same dream, culminating in the same torment. Who has instilled this dream poison into my veins? Who hunts me thus with terror? Who covets my sleep, that he must rob me of it; who is my torturer, and for whom must I thus hold vigil? Answer! Who art thou, invisible one, aiming at me from the darkness thy winged shafts? Who art thou, terror incarnate, coming to lie with me by night, quickening me with thy spirit until my frame is twisted as with labor pains? Wherefore in this slumbering city should the curse be laid on me alone?

STEFAN ZWEIG

Jeremiah: a drama in nine scenes

Tags: dreams


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

STEFAN ZWEIG

Beware of Pity

Tags: stupidity


England rose before our eyes; the island girdled by the stormy waters in which all the continents of the globe are laved. In that sea-girt isle, the ocean holds sway. The cold and clear gaze of the watery element is reflected in the eyes of the inhabitants. Every one of the dwellers in that land is one of the sea-folk, is himself an island. The storms and dangers of the sea have left their mark, and live on to-day in these English, whose ancestors for centuries were Vikings and sea-raiders. Now peace broods over the isle. But the dwellers therein, used to storms, crave for the lie of the sea with its daily perils.

STEFAN ZWEIG

Confusion of Feelings or Confusion


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.

STEFAN ZWEIG

The Post Office Girl


For when a woman resists an unwelcome passion, she is obeying to the full the law of her sex; the initial gesture of refusal is, so to speak, a primordial instinct in every female, and even if she rejects the most ardent passion she cannot be called inhuman. But how disastrous it is when fate upsets the balance, when a woman so far overcomes her natural modesty as to disclose her passion to a man, when, without the certainty of its being reciprocated, she offers her love, and he, the wooed, remains cold and on the defensive! An insoluble tangle this, always; for not to return a woman's love is to shatter her pride, to violate her modesty.

STEFAN ZWEIG

Beware of Pity

Tags: modesty


He who studies without passion will never become anything more than a pedant.

STEFAN ZWEIG

Confusion of Feelings or Confusion

Tags: passion


Time to leave now, get out of this room, go somewhere, anywhere; sharpen this feeling of happiness and freedom, stretch your limbs, fill your eyes, be awake, wider awake, vividly awake in every sense and every pore.

STEFAN ZWEIG

The Post Office Girl


Ah, how fatefully swift is the move from one feeling to another.

STEFAN ZWEIG

Confusion

Tags: emotion


I regard memory not as a phenomenon preserving one thing and losing another merely by chance, but as a power that deliberately places events in order or wisely omits them. Everything we forget about our own lives was really condemned to oblivion by an inner instinct long ago.

STEFAN ZWEIG

The World of Yesterday

Tags: memory


It is the way of youth that each fresh piece of knowledge of life should go to its head, and that once uplifted by an emotion it can never have enough of it.

STEFAN ZWEIG

Beware of Pity

Tags: youth


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

STEFAN ZWEIG

Beware of Pity

Tags: originality


Verlaine was a man of moods, he was always only the creature of the moment. After a few seconds the movement of his will contracted limply and momentary desires overflooded his consciousness of personality. His faith may have been as capricious and restless, as each one of his tendencies of passion. Great poems, however, in the sense of great in extent, are not conceived in a moment. Moods spread like a fine mist over the poet's hours, they permeate them and fill them through and through for a long time before a poem takes form.

STEFAN ZWEIG

Paul Verlaine