Austrian novelist, playwright & journalist (1881-1942)
Brothers, I see a meaning in this pain and suffering; I see God therein. The hour is sent to us for trial. Let us meet the test.
STEFAN ZWEIG
Jeremiah: a drama in nine scenes
Next morning I crept up to my room, the bitter flavour of disgust and shame in my mouth. Now that the warmth of her body no longer troubled my senses I felt the glaring reality, the repulsive nature of my betrayal. I knew at once that I would never again be able to look him in the face, never again take his hand--I had robbed myself, not him, of what meant most to me.
STEFAN ZWEIG
Confusion
How quietly the town reposes in God's arms, nestling in slumber, roofed over by peace, the moonbeams falling on every house, and every house plunged in gentle sleep. But I, I alone, am consumed with fire night after night; I crash earthward with the falling towers, rush to escape, perish amid the flames; I, and none but I, my bowels troubled, leap heated from my bed and stagger forth into the moonlight seeking coolness! For me alone comes a vision to shatter sleep; for me alone does a fiery horror wrench the darkness from my lids. The martyrdom of this vision; the madness of these faces which swarm in their blood-stained multitude and then fade in the clear moonlight!
STEFAN ZWEIG
Jeremiah: a drama in nine scenes
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.
STEFAN ZWEIG
Beware of Pity
There is nothing more vindictive, nothing more underhanded, than a little world that would like to be a big one.
STEFAN ZWEIG
The Post Office Girl
Only ambition is fired by the coincidences of success and easy accomplishment.
STEFAN ZWEIG
Stellar Moments in Human History
The union of opposites, in so far as they are really complementary, always results in the most perfect harmony; and the seemingly incongruous is often the most natural.
STEFAN ZWEIG
Beware of Pity
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.
STEFAN ZWEIG
Beware of Pity
When one does another person an injustice, in some mysterious way it does one good to discover (or to persuade oneself) that the injured party has also behaved badly or unfairly in some little matter or other; it is always a relief to the conscience if one can apportion some measure of guilt to the person one has betrayed.
STEFAN ZWEIG
Beware of Pity
Happy people are poor psychologists.
STEFAN ZWEIG
The Post Office Girl
He was the kind of young man whose handsome face has brought him plenty of success in the past and is now ever-ready for a new encounter, a fresh-experience, always eager to set off into the unknown territory of a little adventure, never taken by surprise because he has worked out everything in advance and is waiting to see what happens, a man who will never overlook any erotic opportunity, whose first glance probes every woman's sensuality, and explores it, without discriminating between his friend's wife and the parlour-maid who opens the door to him.
STEFAN ZWEIG
The Burning Secret and Other Stories
For one who is having no personal experience, the passionate disquiet of others is at any rate a titillation of the nerves, like seeing a play or listening to music.
STEFAN ZWEIG
Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman
Names have a mysterious transforming power. Like a ring on a finger, a name may at first seem merely accidental, committing you to nothing; but before you realize its magical power, it's gotten under your skin, become part of you and your destiny.
STEFAN ZWEIG
The Post Office Girl
There are two kinds of pity. One, the weak and sentimental kind, which is really no more than the heart's impatience to be rid as quickly as possible of the painful emotion aroused by the sight of another's unhappiness, that pity which is not compassion, but only an instinctive desire to fortify one's own soul against the sufferings of another; and the other, the only one that counts, the unsentimental but creative kind, which knows what it is about and is determined to hold out, in patience and forbearance, to the very limit of its strength and even beyond.
STEFAN ZWEIG
Beware of Pity
It is only at first that pity, like morphine, is a solace to the invalid, a remedy, a drug, but unless you know the correct dosage and when to stop, it becomes a virulent poison. The first few injections do good, they soothe, they deaden the pain. But the devil of it is that the organism, the body, just like the soul, has an uncanny capacity for adaptation. Just as the nervous system cries out for more and more morphine, so do the emotions cry out for more and more pity, in the end more than one can give. Inevitably there comes a moment when one has to say 'no', and then one must not mind the other person's hating one more for this ultimate refusal than if one had never helped him at all.
STEFAN ZWEIG
Beware of Pity
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.
STEFAN ZWEIG
Beware of Pity
Fear is a distorting mirror in which anything can appear as a caricature of itself, stretched to terrible proportions; once inflamed, the imagination pursues the craziest and most unlikely possibilities. What is most absurd suddenly seems the most probable.
STEFAN ZWEIG
The Post Office Girl
Once shame touches your being at any point, even the most distant nerve is implicated, whether you know it or not; any fleeting encounter or random thought will rake up the anguish and add to it.
STEFAN ZWEIG
The Post Office Girl
Sometimes I have the feeling that you are not quite aware--and this honors you--of the historical greatness of your position, that you think too modestly about yourself. Everything you do is destined to be of historic significance. One day, your letters, your decisions, will belong to all mankind, like those of Wagner and Brahms.
STEFAN ZWEIG
letter to Richard Strauss, Feb. 23, 1935
Dickens was the incorporation of the artistic needs of the England of his day. And precisely because he happened to be born at that time, he fulfilled his nation's requirements, and therewith ascended the ladder of fame. It was a tragedy for him, however, that the nation's needs in his day should have been what they were. His art was nourished upon the disingenuous moral code of a well-fed England which desired nothing so much as to be comfortable. Were it not for the outstanding powers of the author's imagination, did not his delectable sense of humour pervade and irradiate the vapid emotional content of the work, his achievement would have had value for the English world of that day alone. His novels would have meant no more to us than a thousand others of his own land and century. It is only when one is able to hate the insincerity and narrow-mindedness of the Victorian era with one's whole heart and soul, that one can fully appreciate the amazing genius of the man who could make interesting this smug and detestable world, make it not only interesting but even lovable, turning the most platitudinous and prosy of social outlooks and conditions into living poetry.
STEFAN ZWEIG
Balzac, Dickens, Dostoevsky: Master Builders of the Spirit