Austrian novelist, playwright & journalist (1881-1942)
It is never until one realizes that one means something to others that one feels there is any point or purpose in one's own existence.
STEFAN ZWEIG
Beware of Pity
A child when afraid thrusts out his arms, and those that are falling hold out the hand to passers-by for aid; similarly, creative artists project their sorrows and joys and all their sudden pain which is greater than their own strength. They hold them out like a net with which to ensnare, like a rope by which to escape. Like beggars on the street weighed down with misery and want, they give their words to passers-by. Each syllable gives relief because they thus project their own life into that of strangers. Their fortune and misfortune, their rejoicing and complaint, too heavy for them, are sown in the destiny of others.
STEFAN ZWEIG
prelude, Paul Verlaine
Through suffering we have endured the assaults of time; reverses have ever been our beginning; and out of the depths God has gathered us to his heart.
STEFAN ZWEIG
Jeremiah: a drama in nine scenes
Long-protracted suffering is apt to exhaust not only the invalid, but the compassion of others; violent emotions cannot be prolonged endlessly.
STEFAN ZWEIG
Beware of Pity
Almost all gamesters learn to control their faces ... The Hand blabs secrets shamelessly.
STEPHAN ZWEIG
Four-and-Twenty Hours in a Woman's Life
There is nothing that so raises a young man's self-esteem, that so contributes to the formation of his character as for him to find himself unexpectedly confronted with a task which he has to accomplish entirely on his own initiative and by his own efforts.
STEFAN ZWEIG
Beware of Pity
It is usual for a woman, even though she may ardently desire to give herself to a man, to feign reluctance, to simulate alarm or indignation. She must be brought to consent by urgent pleading, by lies, adjurations, and promises. I know that only professional prostitutes are accustomed to answer such an invitation with a perfectly frank assent -- prostitutes, or simple-minded, immature girls.
STEFAN ZWEIG
Letter from an Unknown Woman
No guilt is forgotten so long as the conscience still knows of it.
STEFAN ZWEIG
Beware of Pity
It is a blessing not yet to have acquired that over-keen, diagnostic, misanthropic eye, and to be able to look at people and things trustfully when one first sees them.
STEFAN ZWEIG
Beware of Pity
The dressmaker doesn't have problems unless the dress has to hide rather than reveal.
STEFAN ZWEIG
The Post Office Girl
How ugly this room was, how shaming their presence here seemed, how disappointing was this moment when they were together, a moment longed for so much over the years--but neither he nor she had wanted it to be so sudden, to show itself in all its shameless nudity! For the space of three, four, five breaths--he counted them--he looked out, too cowardly to speak first, but then he forced himself to do so. No, no, this would not do, he said. And just as he had known and feared in advance, she stood in the middle of the room as if turned to stone in her grey dustcoat, her arms hanging down as if they had snapped, as if she were something that did not belong here and had entered this unpleasant room only by the accident of force and chance. She had taken off her gloves, obviously to put them down, but then she must have felt revulsion against the idea of placing them anywhere here, and so they dangled empty from her fingers, like the husks of her hands. Her gaze was fixed, her eyes veiled, but when he turned they looked at him with a plea in them. He understood. "Why don't we--" and his voice stumbled over the breath he was expelling-- "why don't we go for a little walk? It's so gloomy in here."
STEFAN ZWEIG
Journey Into the Past
One can run away from anything but oneself.
STEFAN ZWEIG
Beware of Pity
We who have been hunted through the rapids of life, torn from our former roots, always driven to the end and obliged to begin again, victims and yet also the willing servants of unknown mysterious powers, we for whom comfort has become an old legend and security, a childish dream, have felt tension from pole to pole of our being, the terror of something always new in every fibre. Every hour of our years was linked to the fate of the world. In sorrow and in joy we have lived through time and history far beyond our own small lives, while they knew nothing beyond themselves. Every one of us, therefore, even the least of the human race, knows a thousand times more about reality today than the wisest of our forebears. But nothing was given to us freely; we paid the price in full.
STEFAN ZWEIG
The World of Yesterday
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.
STEFAN ZWEIG
Beware of Pity
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
No sooner had he said it than she understood, and he placed the room-key, heavy and shining, in his hand, so abruptly did that one sharply outlined, bright association plucked from the sleeping depths of memory come to the surface. The shadows there on the path had touched and woken her own words, and more besides. With a shiver running down his spine, he suddenly felt the full truth and sense of them. Had not those spectres searching for their past been muted questions, asked of a time that was no longer real, mere shadows wanting to come back to life but unable to do so now? 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.
STEFAN ZWEIG
Journey Into the Past
It is better to pay tribute of gold to the enemy than tribute of blood in war.
STEFAN ZWEIG
Jeremiah: a drama in nine scenes
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
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
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