“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.”

“...My husband made my dreams come true, and because he could do that I married him."

“In times of exceptional stress, nature will often give people's behavior so tragical a complexion that neither a picture nor a verbal description is competent to represent its titanic energy.”

“Memory is so corrupt that you remember only what you want to; if you want to forget about something, slowly but surely you do.”

“He had no taste for his own company and avoided such an encounter as much as possible, for the last thing he wanted was to make close acquaintance with himself.”

“For vanity, too, inebriates; gratitude, too, intoxicates; tenderness, too, can blissfully confuse the senses.”

“his jest implies: “Anybody who wants to be a real musician must be able to set even a menu to music.”

“Books are my kingdom. And here I seek to reign as absolute lord.”

“We must “conserve the freedom of our soul and not mortgage it, except on those rare occasions when we deem it the right path”.”

“An intellect that does not have a fixed target is as good as lost. Whoever wants to be everywhere is nowhere. No wind blows for him who has no harbour.”

“But we need to make a distinction: we can love this or that, but we cannot “form a marriage bond” unless it is with our own selves.”

“The longest voyage of discovery, the boldest adventure in the records of our race, had begun.”

“And 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.”

“soothing silence instead of an oppressive one.”

“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.”

“And it is only delusion, and not knowledge, that bestows happiness.”

“A life without envy, hatred and lies was not a life worth living.”

“Immer sind die Instinkte wissender als unsere wachen Gedanken.”

“Ambition had never troubled me, so I decided to begin by watching life at my leisure for a few years, waiting until I finally felt tempted to find some circle of influence for myself.”

“All things considered, he stuck to his basic attitude of enjoying wealth by knowing that he had it, rather than by making a great display of it.”

“For tradition also and always means inhibition.”

“That is how our arch-adventurer likes to live, moving on from explosion to explosion of fortune and misfortune.”

“One can run away from anything but oneself”

“The Minister-President or the richest magnate could walk the streets of Vienna without anyone turning around, but a court actor or an opera singer was recognized by every salesgirl and every cabdriver.”

“But this first installation was by no means the last. Every year the Queen had some new fancy for beautifying her miniature kingdom with more highly artificial and more “natural” additions and alterations.”

“For the first time in my life I had received an assurance that I had been of use to someone on this earth, and my astonishment at the thought that I, a commonplace, unsophisticated young officer, should really have the power to make someone else so happy knew no bounds.”

“Art always reaches its peak where it becomes the life interest of a people.”

“She wanted, out of a kind of mysterious vindictiveness born of despair, to torture us with her torture, to arraign us, the hale and hearty, in the place of God.”

“and it was the pride and ambition of the Jewish people to co-operate in the front ranks to carry on the former glory of the fame of Viennese culture.”

“All office workers are afraid of being late for work.”

“Never have I experienced in a people and in myself so powerful a surge of life as at that period when our very existence and survival were at stake.”

“Pity, like morphine, does the sick good only at first. It is a means of helping them to feel better, but if you don't get the dose right and know where to stop it becomes a murderous poison.”