Stefan Zweig (1881 – 1942)
Austrian novelist, playwright, journalist and biographer.
There is nothing more vindictive, nothing more underhanded, than a little world that would like to be a big one.
Gratitude fills us with rejoicing, for it so rarely finds frank expression; delicacy of feeling warms our hearts.
Youth is always right. Those who follow the counsels of youth are wise.
One's emotional state is always determined by the oddest and most accidental things, and it is precisely the most superficial factors that often fortify or diminish our courage.
In some mysterious way, once one has gained an insight into human nature, that insight grows from day to day, and he to whom it has given to experience vicariously even one single form of earthly suffering acquires, by reason of this tragic lesson, an understanding of all its forms, even those most foreign to him, and apparently abnormal.
When a dozen men are harnessed to the same cart, one always pulls harder than the others, and when it's a question of promotion and seniority, it's easy to tread on the toes of the man ahead of you. At every word one utters one has to be on one's guard; one's never quite sure whether it isn't going to arouse the disapproval of the big bugs; there's always a storm in the offing.
Life is futile unless it be directed towards a definite goal.
Everything in life that deviates from the straight and, so to speak, normal line, makes people first curious and then indignant.
I have loved you ever since. I know full well that you are used to hearing women say that they love you. But I am sure that no one else has ever loved you so lavishly, with such doglike fidelity, with such devotion, as I did and do. Nothing can equal the unnoticed love of a child. It is hopeless and subservient; it is patient and passionate; it is something which the covetous love of a grown woman, the love that is unconsciously exacting, can never be. Non but lonely children can cherish such a passion. The others will squander their feelings in companionship, will dissipate them in confidential talks. They have heard and read much of love, and they know that it comes to all. They play with it like a toy; they flaunt it as a boy flaunts his first cigarette. But I had no confidant; I had been neither taught nor warned; I was inexperience and unsuspecting.
But 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.
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.
Anger makes one not only malign but sharp-sighted.