Frases de Stefan Zweig

“A primeira mostra de uma autêntica vocação política é, em todos os tempos, que um homem renuncie desde o princípio a exigir aquilo que lhe é inalcançável.”

“Sempre os que dizem de antemão que lutam em nome de Deus são pessoas menos pacíficas do mundo: como crêem que recebem mensagens celestiais, têm os ouvidos surdos para qualquer palavra de humanidade.”

“A calma é um elemento criador. Purifica, recolhe, põe em ordem as forças internas, compensando o que o desordenado movimento dispersa.”

“Aqueles que anunciam que lutam a favor de Deus são sempre os homens menos pacíficos da terra. Como crêem receber mensagens celestiais, têm os ouvidos surdos a qualquer palavra de humanidade.”

“Cada um de nós é vencido apenas pelo destino que não soube dominar. Não há derrota que não tenha um significado e não represente também uma culpa.”

“Só goza a vida aquele que viva para viver e se lhe entregue livre e prodigamente. Todo aquele que fixa uma meta apenas a toca. O artista plasma, geralmente, o que não chega a viver.”

“A vida não dá coisa alguma sem retribuição e sobre cada coisa concedida pelo destino, há secretamente um preço, que cedo ou tarde deverá ser pago.”

“Toda a beleza do ser humano consiste em se tornar algo melhor do que se foi.”

“Nada torna as pessoas mais desnaturalizadas e insubordinadas do que uma longa e constante ociosidade.”

“Toda a ciência provém da dor. A dor procura sempre a causa das coisas, enquanto o bem-estar se inclina a estar quieto e a não olhar para trás.”

“A velhice não significa mais do que deixar de sofrer pelo passado.”

“Hábeis e frios calculadores podem vir demonstrar, ainda e sempre, que o sonho do erasmismo é impossível, e os factos poderão parecer dar-lhes razão; isso nao impede que sejam sempre necessários os seres que indicam aos povos aquilo que os aproxima e aquilo que os divide, e que renovam no coração dod homens a crença em mais alta humanidade. Há no legado de Erasmo uma promessa criadora. Aquele que mostra o espírito fora do seu quadro, nas dimensões da Humanidade, dá ao indivíduo uma forma sobre-humana; só as reivindicações ultrapessoais e que parecerem quase irrealizáveis, dão aos homens e aos povos a consciência da sua verdadeira medida.”

“Mas no espírito, há lugar para todas as oposições; mesmo o que nunca triunfa, na realidade, conserva um dinamismo eficaz, e são precisamente os sonhos que nao se podem efectivar os que se mostram mais invencíveis.”

“Envelhecer é apenas não ter mais medo do passado”

“Je ne cesse de m’étonner de la confusion et de l’insuffisance des idées à propos de ce pays, chez des hommes même cultivés er prenant intérêt à la politique, alors que le Brésil est sans aucun doute, destiné à être un facteur des plus importants dans le développement ultérieur de notre monde.”

“Besides, isn't it confoundedly easy to think you're a great man if you aren't burdened with the slightest idea that Rembrandt, Beethoven, Dante or Napoleon ever lived?”

“In this instant, shaken to her very depths, this ecstatic human being has a first inkling that the soul is made of stuff so mysteriously elastic that a single event can make it big enough to contain the infinite.”

“The vast power of money, mighty when you have it and even mightier when you don't, with its divine gift of freedom and the demonic fury it unleashes on those forced to do without it — they felt this as never before and were filled with bitter rage when, in the dark of the early morning, they saw the brightly lit windows and knew that those glowing gold curtains gave shelter and freedom to hundreds of thousands of people, men with women they desired, while they themselves were homeless, plodding blindly through the streets, through the rain; it was cruel as only the sea could be cruel — the sea in which a person can die of thirst.”

“Fear is a distorting mirror in which anything can appear as a caricature of itself, stretched to terrible proportions; once inflamed, the imagination pursues the craziest and most unlikely possibilities. What is most absurd suddenly seems the most probable.”

“Only a numskull is pleased at being a so-called 'success' with women, only a dunderhead is puffed up by it. A real man is much more likely to be dismayed at realizing that a woman has lost her heart to him when he can't reciprocate her feelings.”

“There is no sense to a sacrifice after you come to feel that it is a sacrifice.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“No guilt is forgotten so long as the conscience still knows of it.”

“How terrible this darkness was, how bewildering, and yet mysteriously beautiful!”

“All I know is that I shall be alone again. There is nothing more terrible than to be alone among human beings.”

“In chess, as a purely intellectual game, where randomness is excluded, - for someone to play against himself is absurd…
It is as paradoxical, as attempting to jump over his own shadow.”

“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.”

“Being sent to bed is a terrible command to all children, because it means the most public possible humiliation in front of adults, the confession that they bear the stigma of childhood, of being small and having a child's need for sleep.”

“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.”

“Gratitude is a rare frame of mind; and those who are grateful can seldom find a way to express what they feel. They are overwhelmed by silence; are shamefaced; and, sometimes, actually try to hide their feelings.”

“No envy is more mean than that of small-minded beings when they see a neighbor lifted, as though borne aloft by angels, out of the dull drudgery of their common existence; petty spirits are more ready to forgive a prince the most fabulous wealth than a fellow-sufferer beneath the same yoke the smallest degree of freedom.”

“Everything in life that deviates from the straight and, so to speak, normal line, makes people first curious and then indignant.”

“I have loved you ever since. I know full well that you are used to hearing women say that they love you. But I am sure that no one else has ever loved you so lavishly, with such doglike fidelity, with such devotion, as I did and do. Nothing can equal the unnoticed love of a child. It is hopeless and subservient; it is patient and passionate; it is something which the covetous love of a grown woman, the love that is unconsciously exacting, can never be. Non but lonely children can cherish such a passion. The others will squander their feelings in companionship, will dissipate them in confidential talks. They have heard and read much of love, and they know that it comes to all. They play with it like a toy; they flaunt it as a boy flaunts his first cigarette. But I had no confidant; I had been neither taught nor warned; I was inexperience and unsuspecting.”

“After experiencing profound emotions, one sleeps profoundly.”

“The word 'service' comes from serving, and serving means being dependent.”

“In some mysterious way, once one has gained an insight into human nature, that insight grows from day to day, and he to whom it has given to experience vicariously even one single form of earthly suffering acquires, by reason of this tragic lesson, an understanding of all its forms, even those most foreign to him, and apparently abnormal.”

“In my youth and comparative inexperience I had always regarded the yearning and pangs of love as the worst torture that could afflict the human heart. At this moment, however, I began to realize that there was another and perhaps grimmer torture than that of longing and desiring: that of being loved against one's will and of being unable to defend oneself against the urgency of another's passion; of seeing another human being seared by the flame of her desire and of having to look impotently, lacking the power, the capacity, the strength to pluck her from the flames. He who is himself crossed in love is able from time to time to master his passion, for he is not the creature but the creator of his own misery; and if a lover is unable to control his passim, he at least knows that he is himself to blame for his sufferings.”

“Why is it that the stupidest people are always the most good-natured?”

“I don't have a trace of moral scruple, when it comes to the state I feel completely free. It's committed such terrible crimes against us all, against our generation, that we have a right to anything. I'm not worried about doing it damage, we'll just be recovering some damages for our entire battered generation. Who taught me how to steal, who made me do it, if not the state? Commandeering, that's the word they used during the war, or expropriating — Versailles called it reclamation. Who taught us how to cheat if not the state — how else would we know what money saved up by three generations could become worthless in a mere two weeks, that families could be swindled out of pastures, houses, and fields that had been theirs for a hundred years? Even if I kill someone, who trained me to do it? Six months on the drill field and then years at the front! We have an excellent case against the state, by God, we'll win in every court. It can never pay off its terrible debt, never give back what it took from us. Once there might have been a reason to have some qualms, back when the state was a good custodian, thrifty, decent, proper. Now that it's behaved like a hoodlum, we have the right to be hoodlums too.”

“Confidences are always risky: a secret entrusted to a stranger make him less of one. You've given away something of yourself, given him the advantage.”

“The only respect in which man is superior to animals is that he can die when he wants to, not just when he has to. Maybe it's the one freedom you can always count on — the freedom to throw your life away.”

“One's emotional state is always determined by the oddest and most accidental things, and it is precisely the most superficial factors that often fortify or diminish our courage.”