For I regard memory not as a phenomenon preserving one thing and losing another merely by chance, but as a power that deliberately places events in order or wisely omits them. Everything we forget about our own lives was really condemned to oblivion by an inner instinct long ago.
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.
Querer jugar contra uno mismo representa, en definitiva, una paradoja tan grande como querer saltar sobre la propia sombra.
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.
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.
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.