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There is no understanding of the past without personal experience, without reliving it in imagination. A word is nothing unless it has values and an atmosphere, unless you grasp its historical significance.

— Stefan Zweig Confusion of Feelings or Confusion: The Private Papers of Privy Councillor R. Von D (1927)

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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)

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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.