Stefan Zweig

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Stefan Zweig (28 November 188122 February 1942) was an Austrian novelist, playwright, journalist and biographer.


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  • The organic fundamental error of humanism was that it desired to educate the common people (on whom it looked down) from its lofty stance instead of trying to understand them and to learn from them.
    • Erasmus of Rotterdam, p. 116, trans. by Marion Sonnenfeld
  • All the pale horses of the apocalypse have stormed through my life, revolution, starvation, devaluation of currency and terror, epidemics, emigration; I have seen the great ideologies of the masses grow and spread out before my eyes. Fascism in Italy, National Socialism in Germany, Bolshevism in Russia, and, above all, that archpestilence, nationalism, which poisoned our flourishing European culture.
    • Die Welt von Gestern (The World of Yesterday), p. 10, trans. by Marion Sonnenfeld
  • Immanuel Kant lived with knowledge as with his lawfully wedded wife, slept with it in the same intellectual bed for forty years and begot an entire German race of philosophical systems.
    • Der Kampf mit dem Daemon (The Struggle with the Demon), p. 256, trans. by Marion Sonnenfeld
  • Only ambition is fired by the coincidences of success and easy accomplishment but nothing is quite as splendidly uplifting to the heart as the defeat of a human being who battles against the invincible superiority of fate. This is always the most grandiose of all tragedies, one sometimes created by a dramatist but created thousands of times by life.
    • Sternstunden der Menschheit (Stellar Moments in Human History), p. 280, trans. by Marion Sonnenfeld

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