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The organic fundamental error of humanism was that it desired to educate the common people (on whom it looked down) from its lofty stance instead of trying to understand them and to learn from them.

— Stefan Zweig Erasmus of Rotterdam (1934)

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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 →

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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.