How terrible this darkness was, how bewildering, and yet mysteriously beautiful!

“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.”

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

“Besides, isn't it confoundedly easy to think you're a great man if you aren't burdened with the slightest idea that Rembrandt, Beethoven, Dante or Napoleon ever lived?”

“No guilt is forgotten so long as the conscience still knows of it.”

“All I know is that I shall be alone again. There is nothing more terrible than to be alone among human beings.”

“How terrible this darkness was, how bewildering, and yet mysteriously beautiful!”

“In chess, as a purely intellectual game, where randomness is excluded, - for someone to play against himself is absurd ...

“Freedom is not possible without authority - otherwise it would turn into chaos and authority is not possible without freedom - otherwise it would turn into tyranny.”

“In this instant, shaken to her very depths, this ecstatic human being has a first inkling that the soul is made of stuff so mysteriously elastic that a single event can make it big enough to contain the infinite.”

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

“For the first time in my life I began to realize that it is not evil and brutality, but nearly always weakness, that is to blame for the worst things that happen in this world.”

“Once a man has found himself there is nothing in this world that he can lose. And once he has understood the humanity in himself, he will understand all human beings.”

“Formerly man had only a body and a soul. Now he needs a passport as well for without it he will not be treated like a human being.”

“Beware of pity.”

“People and events don't disappoint us, our models of reality do. It is my model of reality that determines my happiness or disappointments.”

“Art can bring us consolation as individuals,” he said, “but it is powerless against reality.”

“Maybe everything’s not so hard, maybe life is so much easier than I thought, you just need courage, you just need to have a sense of yourself, then you’ll discover your hidden resources.”

“One only makes books in order to keep in touch with one's fellows after one has ceased to breath, and thus to defend oneself against the inexorable fate of all that lives - transitoriness and oblivion.”

“I realized that there was no point in denying oneself a pleasure because it was denied another, in refusing to allow oneself to be happy because someone else was unhappy.”

“A first premonition of the rich variety of life had come to him; for the first time he thought he had understood the nature of human beings - they needed each other even when they appeared hostile, and it was very sweet to be loved by them.”

“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.”

“But I see nothing miraculous about it. Nothing makes one as healthy as happiness, and there is no greater happiness than making someone else happy.”

“Once more my pity had been stronger than my will.”

“She could be lively only in the midst of life; in isolation she dwindled to a shadow.”

“For the more a man restricts himself the closer he is, conversely, to infinity.”

“Exalt yourself by devoting yourself to others, enrich yourself by making everyone’s destiny your own, by enduring and understanding every facet of human suffering through your pity.”

“But theoretical, imagined suffering is not what distresses a man and destroys his peace of mind. Only what you have seen with pitying eyes can really shake you.”

“My today and each of my yesterdays, my rises and falls, are so diverse that I sometimes feel as if I had lived not one, but several existences, each one different from the others.”

“in the general throng, many a fool receives decorations and titles.”

“But since those days in Vienna I had been aware that Austria was lost, not yet suspecting, to be sure, how much I had lost thereby.”

“In medicine the use of the knife is often the kinder course.”

“On the day I lost my passport I discovered, at the age of fifty-eight, that losing one’s native land implies more than parting with a circumscribed area of soil.”

“happiness would prevail where trees were planted.”

“I had an irresistible desire to make a last effort to awaken your memory.”

“It is only the immeasurable, the limitless that terrifies us. That which is set within defined, fixed limits is a challenge to our powers, comes to be the measure of our strength.”

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

“In the last analysis it seems likely that they were wiser than I, all those friends in Vienna, because they suffered everything only when it really happened, whereas I had already suffered the disaster in advance in my fantasy, and then again when it became reality.”

“It remains an irrefragable law of history that contemporaries are denied a recognition of the early beginnings of the great movements which determine their times.”

“Even if I had gone further than in all honesty I should have done, my lies, those lies born of pity, had made her happy; and to make a person happy could never be a crime.”

“And if I am asked today to advise a young writer who has not yet made up his mind what way to go, I would try to persuade him to devote himself first to the work of someone greater, interpreting or translating him.”

“What a mercy, I thought, that the crippled, the maimed, those whom Fate has cheated, at least in sleep have no knowledge of the shapeliness or unshapeliness of their bodies,”

“He listened yet more intently to what was within him, to the past, to see whether that voice of memory truly foretelling the future would not speak to him again, revealing the present to him as well as the past.”

“yet it may serve to show that courage is often nothing but inverted weakness.”

“Nothing gives so keen an edge to the intelligence as a passionate suspicion.”

“Two suitcases, in one the wardrobe, the earthly essentials, in the other- manuscripts, the spiritual supplies, then you are at home everywhere-Zweig GW Tagebuecher p. 383” “Two suitcases, in one the wardrobe, the earthly essentials, in the other- manuscripts, the spiritual supplies, then you are at home everywhere-Zweig GW Tagebuecher p. 383”

“the natural animosity between those who slept and those who were stirring in the sleeping city.”

“Nationalism is the sworn enemy of civilization, whether past, present or future, its malodorous presence thwarting the development of intelligence,”

“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.”

“But spite is a wonderful thing for keeping people alive.”