Stefan Zweig Quotes

You can kill my body, and you can take my life but you can never kill my soul. My soul will live forever!

A charmed life old goodness hath; the tares may perish, but the grain is not for death.

Rise, heart; thy Lord is risen. Sing His praise Without delays, Who takes thee by the hand, that thou likewise With Him mayst rise: That, as His death calcined thee to dust, His life may make thee gold, and, much more, just.

I say that trials and tests locate a person. In other words they determine where you are spiritually. They reveal the true condition of your heart. How you react under pressure is how the real you reacts.

Without self-knowledge you have no root in yourselves personally; you may endure for a time, but under affliction or persecution your faith will not last. This is why many in this age (and in every age) become infidels, heretics, schismatics, disloyal despisers of the Church. They cast off the form of truth, because it never has been to them more than a form. They endure not, because they never have tasted that the Lord is gracious; and they never have had experience of His power and love, because they have never known their own weakness and need.

Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but - I hope - into a better shape.

Listen to your heart. It knows all things, because it came from the Soul of the World and it will one day return there.

Your most profound and intimate experiences of worship will likely be in your darkest days - when your heart is broken, when you feel abandoned, when your out of options, when the pain is great - and you turn to God alone.

The true penance comes when God takes away the soul's health and strength for doing penance. Even though I have mentioned elsewhere the great pain this lack causes, the pain is much more intense here. All these things must come to the soul from its roots, from where it is planted.

So I tell you, my son, that the secret of true happiness is for him who asks nothing in return. The perfectly unselfish man is the one who finds his glory in God. Give what you have to give, and it will come back to you. All materials to build thy home in this world or the inner cosmic worlds come from within, from the God center in thy heart.

Prayer is essentially about making the heart strong so that fear cannot penetrate there.

Solitude is a silent storm that breaks down all our dead branches; yet it sends our living roots deeper into the living heart of the living earth.

Thy will be done, my Lord. Because you know the weakness in the heart of your children, and you assign each of them only the burden they can bear. May you understand my love–because it is the only thing I have that is really mine, the only thing that I will be able to take with me into the next life. Please allow it to be courageous and pure; please make it capable of surviving the snares of the world.

Resolved, when I feel pain, to think of the pains of martyrdom, and of hell.

The way Jesus shows you is not easy. Rather, it is like a path winding up a mountain. Do not lose heart! The steeper the road, the faster it rises towards ever wider horizons.

When I knew I couldn't suffer another moment of pain, and tears fell on my bloody bindings, my mother spoke softly into my ear, encouraging me to go one more hour, one more day, one more week, reminding me of the rewards I would have if I carried on a little longer. In this way, she taught me how to endure — not just the physical trials of footbinding and childbearing but the more torturous pain of the heart, mind, and soul.

Oh, ye infidel philosophers, teach me how to find joy in sorrow, strength in weakness, and light in darkest days; how to bear buffeting and scorn; how to welcome death, and to pass through it into the sphere of life, and this not for me only, but for the whole world that groans and travails in pain; and till you can do this, speak not to me of a better revelation than the Bible.

For the human soul is virtually indestructible, and its ability to rise from the ashes remains as long as the body draws breath.

Whether joy or sorrow, pain or pleasure; whatsoever may befall thee, accept it serenely with an unvanquished heart.

Suffering brings your heart to bear. It gets you where you are!

Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding. Even as the stone of the fruit must break, that its heart may stand in the sun, so must you know pain.

From bitter searching of the heart, quickened with passion and with pain we rise to play a greater part this is the faith from which we start.

I wipe away my tears and nod, because the pain in my leg is nothing compare to the one in my heart.

Do you believe in a future everlasting life? No, not in a future everlasting but in an everlasting life here. There are moments, you reach moments, and time comes to a sudden stop, and it will become eternal.