Austrian novelist, playwright & journalist (1881-1942)
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Their childish high spirits succeeded entirely in diverting my thoughts from the subject that they usually circled, like bees buzzing around a darkly oozing honey-comb, and no sooner did I step into the open air and feel my muscles stretched to the full again in an improvised race with the young woman than I was the fit, carefree boy of the past once more.
STEFAN ZWEIG
Confusion
The soul is made of stuff so mysteriously elastic that a single event can make it big enough to contain the infinite.
STEFAN ZWEIG
The Post Office Girl
Why is it that the stupidest people are always the most good-natured?
STEFAN ZWEIG
Beware of Pity
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
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
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
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
Even from the abyss of horror in which we try to feel our way today, half-blind, our hearts distraught and shattered, I look up again and again to the ancient constellations that shone on my childhood, comforting myself with the inherited confidence that, some day, this relapse will appear only an interval in the eternal rhythm of progress onward and upward.
STEFAN ZWEIG
The World of Yesterday
He who studies without passion will never become anything more than a pedant.
STEFAN ZWEIG
Confusion of Feelings or Confusion
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
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
Hairdressers are professional gossips; when only the hands are busy, the tongue is seldom still.
STEFAN ZWEIG
The Post Office Girl
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