Mr. Zweig always encouraged his friends to set down their reminiscences, not necessarily for publication but for the pleasure and benefit of their children, their families. In his opinion every life includes inner or external experiences worthy of record.
One goes wherever one is still admitted. Someone told me that I might be able to get a visa for Haiti or San Domingo here.
He read as others pray, as gamblers follow the spinning of the roulette wheel, as drunkards stare into vacancy; he read with such profound absorption that ever since I first watched him the reading of ordinary mortals seemed a pastime.
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.
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.
Alt werden heisst nichts anderes, als keine Angst mehr haben vor der Vergangenheit.
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.
Only the misfortune of exile can provide the in-depth understanding and the overview into the realities of the world.
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.
In history, the moments during which reason and reconciliation prevail are short and fleeting.
There is nothing more vindictive, nothing more underhanded, than a little world that would like to be a big one.
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.
Truth to tell, we are all criminals if we remain silent...
Happy people are poor psychologists.
Those whom fate has dealt hard knocks remain vulnerable for ever afterwards.
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.
Nothing whets the intelligence more than a passionate suspicion, nothing develops all the faculties of an immature mind more than a trail running away into the dark.
No guilt is forgotten so long as the conscience still knows of it.
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.
Unless our souls had root in soil divine We could not bear earth’s overwhelming strife. The fiercest pain that racks this heart of mine, Convinces me of everlasting life.