STEFAN ZWEIG

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

Fate is never too generous even to its favorites. Rarely do the gods grant a mortal more than one immortal deed.

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

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

One must be convinced to convince, to have enthusiasm to stimulate the others.

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

In history, the moments during which reason and reconciliation prevail are short and fleeting.

Often the presence of mind and energy of a person remote from the spotlight decide the course of history for centuries to come.

The free, independent spirit who commits himself to no dogma and will not decide in favor of any party has no homestead on earth.

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

There is no sense to a sacrifice after you come to feel that it is a sacrifice.

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

In history as in human life, regret does not bring back a lost moment and a thousand years will not recover something lost in a single hour.

When they are preparing for war, those who rule by force speak most copiously about peace until they have completed the mobilization process.

Never can the innate power of a work be hidden or locked away. A work of art can be forgotten by time; it can be forbidden and rejected but the elemental will always prevail over the ephemeral.

The subject of a rumor is always the last to hear it.

But don't despise error. When touched by genius, when led by chance, the most superior truth can come into being from even the most foolish error. The important inventions which have been brought about in every realm of science from false hypotheses number in the hundreds, indeed in the thousands.

Art knows no happier moment than the opportunity to show the symmetry of an extreme, during that moment of spheric harmony when the dissonance dissolves for the blink of an eye, dissolves into a blissful harmony, when the most extreme opposites, coming together from the greatest alienation, fleetingly touch with lips of the word and of love.

Heroic ages are not and never were sentimental and those daring conquistadores who conquered entire worlds for their Spain or Portugal received lamentably little thanks from their kings.

for the more a man restricts himself the closer he is, conversely, to infinity.

For 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.

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.

Only ambition is fired by the coincidences of success and easy accomplishment.

Confidences are always risky: a secret entrusted to a stranger make him less of one. You've given away something of yourself, given him the advantage.