{"author":"Stefan Zweig","author_id":"Stefan+Zweig","total_quotes":41,"quotes":[{"text":"He felt a kind of bridal expectation, sweet and sensuous yet vaguely mingled with anticipatory fear of its own fulfilment, with the mysterious shiver felt when something endlessly desired suddenly comes physically close to the astonished heart.","author":"Stefan Zweig","tags":["desire","fulfilment"],"id":6932,"author_id":"Stefan+Zweig"},{"text":"As everyone knows, it is a thousand times easier to reconstruct the facts of what happened at a certain time than its intellectual atmosphere. The atmosphere is reflected not in official events but, most conspicuously, in small, personal episodes...","author":"Stefan Zweig","tags":["history"],"id":13929,"author_id":"Stefan+Zweig"},{"text":"For the first time I began to perceive that true sympathy cannot be switched on and off like an electric current, that anyone that identifies himself with the fate of another is robbed to some extent of his own freedom.","author":"Stefan Zweig","tags":["another","fate","freedom","identify","identity","individuality","rob","robbed","sympathy"],"id":22888,"author_id":"Stefan+Zweig"},{"text":"A life without envy, hatred and lies was not a life worth living.","author":"Stefan Zweig","tags":["envy","hatred","lies","madame-de-prie","twilight"],"id":32412,"author_id":"Stefan+Zweig"},{"text":"Arrived at an age when others had already long been married and had children and held important positions, and were obliged to produce the best that was in them with all their energy, I still regarded myself as youthful, a beginner who faced immeasurable time, and I was hesitant about final decisions of any kind.","author":"Stefan Zweig","tags":["inexperience","time","youth"],"id":42563,"author_id":"Stefan+Zweig"},{"text":"One must be convinced to convince, to have enthusiasm to stimulate the others.","author":"Stefan Zweig","tags":["enthusiasm","convince","must "],"id":46728,"author_id":"Stefan+Zweig"},{"text":"For when a woman resists an unwelcome passion, she is obeying to the full the law of her sex; the initial gesture of refusal is, so to speak, a primordial instinct in every female, and even if she rejects the most ardent passion she cannot be called inhuman. But how disastrous it is when fate upsets the balance, when a woman so far overcomes her natural modesty as to disclose her passion to a man, when, without the certainty of its being reciprocated, she offers her love, and he, the wooed, remains cold and on the defensive! An insoluble tangle this, always; for not to return a woman's love is to shatter her pride, to violate her modesty. The man who rejects a woman's advances is bound to wound her in her noblest feelings. In vain, then, all the tenderness with which he extricates himself, useless all his polite, evasive phrases, insulting all his offers of mere friendship, once she has revealed her weakness! His resistance inevitably becomes cruelty, and in rejecting a woman's love he takes a load of guild upon his conscience, guiltless though he may be. Abominable fetters that can never be cast off!","author":"Stefan Zweig","tags":["gender-roles","love","male-perspective","modesty","pride","rejection","unrequited-love"],"id":56777,"author_id":"Stefan+Zweig"},{"text":"A lame creature, a cripple like myself, has no right to love. How should I, broken, shattered being that I am, be anything but a burden to you, when to myself I am an object of disgust, of loathing. A creature such as I, I know, has no right to love, and certainly no right to be loved. It is for such a creature to creep away into a corner and die and cease to make other people's lives a burden with her presence.","author":"Stefan Zweig","tags":["broken","burden","cease","creature","creep","cripple","die","disgust","hide","lame","loathing","love","right","shattered"],"id":61520,"author_id":"Stefan+Zweig"},{"text":"Homeward bound I suddenly noticed before me my own shadow as I had seen the shadow of the other war behind the actual one. During all this time it has never budged from me, that irremovable shadow, it hovers over every thought of mine by day and by night; perhaps its dark outline lies on some pages of this book, too. But, after all, shadows themselves are born of light. And only he who has experienced dawn and dusk, war and peace, ascent and decline, only he has truly lived.","author":"Stefan Zweig","tags":["meaning-of-life"],"id":71085,"author_id":"Stefan+Zweig"},{"text":"...My husband made my dreams come true, and because he could do that I married him.'Then he says softly, as if to himself, 'But what about love?'She heard that. A slight smile comes to her lips.'Do you still have all the ideals, all the ideals that you took to that distant world with you? Are they all still intact , or have some of them died or withered away? Haven't they been torn out of you by force and flung in the dirt, where thousands of wheels carrying vehicles to their owners' destination in life crushed them? Or have you lost none of them?","author":"Stefan Zweig","tags":["dreams"],"id":71510,"author_id":"Stefan+Zweig"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":41,"pages":5,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}