Often the presence of mind and energy of a person remote from the spotlight decide the course of history for centuries to come.
Stefan ZweigWith Nietzsche, the black pirates' flag appears for the first time on the high sea of German knowledge. (He is) a different man, from a different race, (his,) a new kind of heroism, philosophywith bellicose weapons and armor.
Stefan ZweigThe world has always needed human beings who refuse to believe that history is nothing but a dull, monstrous selfrepetition, a selfperpetuating, meaningless game, only varied in outer garb, who cannot be converted from their conviction that history signifies progress in morality, that our race is ascending on an invisible ladder from an animal nature towards divinity, from brutal violence to the wisely ordering intellect, and that the ultimate stage of complete understanding is already close at hand, indeed has almost been attained.
Stefan ZweigOne never gets to know a person's character better than by watching his behavior during decisive moments.... It is always only danger which forces the most deeply hidden strengths and abilities of a human being to come forth.
Stefan ZweigAgain and again, faith in a possible satisfaction of the human race breaks through at the very moments of most zealous discord because humankind will never be able to live and work without this consoling delusion of its ascent into morality, without this dream of final and ultimate accord.
Stefan ZweigWe live through myriads of seconds, yet it is always one, just one, that casts our entire inner world into turmoil, the second when (as Stendhal has described it) the internal inflorescence, already steeped in every kind of fluid, condenses and crystallizesโa magical second, like the moment of generation, and like that moment concealed in the warm interior of the individual life, invisible, untouchable, beyond the reach of feeling, a secret experienced alone. No algebra of the mind can calculate it, no alchemy of premonition divine it, and it can seldom perceive itself.
Stefan Zweig