Skip to content

Only ambition is fired by the coincidences of success and easy accomplishment but nothing is quite as splendidly uplifting to the heart as the defeat of a human being who battles against the invincible superiority of fate. This is always the most grandiose of all tragedies, one sometimes created by a dramatist but created thousands of times by life.

— Stefan Zweig Stellar Moments in Human History [Sternstunden der Menschheit (1953)

Another quote →

More quotes by Stefan Zweig

It is never until one realizes that one means something to others that one feels there is any point or purpose in one's own existence.

Beware of Pity (1939)

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

Beware of Pity (1939)

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

Beware of Pity (1939)

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

Beware of Pity (1939)

Immanuel Kant lived with knowledge as with his lawfully wedded wife, slept with it in the same intellectual bed for forty years and begot an entire German race of philosophical systems.

The Struggle with the Demon [Der Kampf mit dem Daemon (1929)

All Stefan Zweig quotes →

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Stefan Zweig (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.