Stefan Zweig Quotes

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 gardener's delight, holds them like fragile objects in his thin, bloodless hands.

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.

There is nothing more vindictive, nothing more underhanded, than a little world that would like to be a big one.

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.

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

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.

He read as others pray, as gamblers follow the spinning of the roulette wheel, as drunkards stare into vacancy; he read with such profound absorption that ever since I first watched him the reading of ordinary mortals seemed a pastime.

Wer einmal sich selbst gefunden, kann nichts auf dieser Welt mehr verlieren.

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.

Seuls les enfants solitaires peuvent contenir toute leur passion; les autres, à trop causer éventent leurs sentiments en public, les émoussent en vaines confidences.

Celui qui n'est pas passionné devient tout au plus un pédagogue; c'est toujours par l'intérieur qu'il faut aller aux choses, toujours, toujours en partant de la passion.