Stefan Zweig Quotes

I recognize that I'm human, and the older I get, the more I realize how fallible I am, how fallible we all are.

I'm interested in the human more than I'm interested in building suspense.

If you asked me what is the basis of all my work, it's the feeling there's something basically wrong with human beings.

One who understands the relationships between the human heart and the human mind will always out-hack those who chase after an ever-changing technology.

I am a flawed human being - a far more flawed human being than you realize.

How embarrassing to be human.

With a little time, and a little more insight, we begin to see both ourselves and our enemies in humbler profiles. We are not really as innocent as we felt when we were first hurt. And we do not usually have a gigantic monster to forgive; we have a weak, needy, and somewhat stupid human being. When you see your enemy and yourself in the weakness and silliness of the humanity you share, you will make the miracle of forgiving a little easier.

The human race has to be bad at psychology; if it were not, it would understand why it is bad at everything else.

We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.

Try to understand why it is happening, from where it is coming, where the roots are, how it happens, how it functions, how it overpowers you, how in anger you become mad. Anger has happened before, it is happening now, but now add a new element to it, the element of understanding -- and then the quality will change. Then, by and by, you will see that the more you understand anger, the less it happens. And when you understand it perfectly, it disappears. Understanding is like heat. When the heat comes to a particular point -- one hundred degrees -- the water disappears.

Every form of strength is also a form of weakness,” he once wrote. “Pretty girls tend to become insufferable because, being pretty, their faults are too much tolerated. Possessions entrap men, and wealth paralyzes them. I learned to write because I am one of those people who somehow cannot manage the common communications of smiles and gestures, but must use words to get across things that other people would never need to say.

The thing I have to keep in mind and I try to keep in mind about myself, about anyone, is you do the best you can do at the time.

I think acting has made me very in tune with human behavior and myself as well.

We always condemn most in others, he thought, that which we most fear in ourselves.

Knowledge subverts love: in proportion as we penetrate our secrets, we come to loathe our kind, precisely because they resemble us.

It turns out that justices are also God’s children; and being of this world, their makeup consists of actual flesh and blood. They are no more noble or virtuous than the rest of us, and in some cases less so, as they suffer from the usual human imperfections and frailties. And the Court’s history proves it.

Many an object is not seen, though it falls within the range of our visual ray, because it does not come within the range of our intellectual ray.

Then again, Solomon was human. And that meant he was flawed (Go on, take a look at yourself in the mirror. A good long look, if you can bear it. See? Flawed's putting it mildly, isn't it?)

Yeah, I think that I have like, faltered, you know, as a human. My message isn’t perfectly defined. I have, as a human being, fallen to peer pressure.

Wherever an inferiority complex exists, there is a good reason for it.

Vanity calculates but poorly on the vanity of others; what a virtue we should distil from frailty, what a world of pain we should save our brethren, if we would suffer our own weakness to be the measure of theirs.

Don't think that I'm - I'd- I'm infallible. Will always make mistakes.

Irony gives us, at little expense, the impression that we are experienced psychologists.

God knows I've got so many frailties myself, I ought to be able to understand and forgive them in others. But I don't.

I will not quarrel with a slight mistake, Such as our nature's frailty may excuse.