The first lesson — great men are always the kindest. The second lesson was that they nearly always lead the simplest lives.
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Stefan Zweig
Stefan Zweig (/zwaɪɡ, swaɪɡ/; German: [tsvaɪk]; November 28, 1881 – February 22, 1942) was an Austrian novelist, playwright, journalist and biographer. At the height of his literary career, in the 1920s and 1930s, he was one of the most popular writers in the world. 2Biography Zweig was born in Vienna, the son of Moritz Zweig (1845–1926), a wealthy Jewish textile manufacturer, and Ida Brettauer (1854–1938), a daughter of a Jewish banking family. He was related to the Czech writer Egon Hostovský, who described him as "a very distant relative"; some sources describe them as cousins. Zweig studied philosophy at the University of Vienna and in 1904 earned a doctoral degree with a thesis on "The Philosophy of Hippolyte Taine". Religion did not play a central role in his education. "My mother and father were Jewish only through accident of birth," Zweig said later in an interview. Yet he did not renounce his Jewish faith and wrote repeatedly on Jews and Jewish themes, as in his story Buchmendel. Zweig had a warm relationship with Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, whom he met when Herzl was still literary editor of the Neue Freie Presse, then Vienna's main newspaper; Herzl accepted for publication some of Zweig's early essays. Zweig believed in internationalism and in Europeanism, as The World of Yesterday, his autobiography, makes clea
For you cannot know the world by just navel-gazing. This is why he reads history and studies philosophy: not to draw lessons and precepts, but to understand how other men have acted in the past, so that he can compare his own situation with theirs.
One must seek another certitude beyond the world, beyond the homeland; one must refuse to join the chorus of the demonically and create one’s own homeland, one’s own world, outside the present time.
When there is more space, the soul opens up.
We too need to stand the test, to endure one of the most horrifying collapses of humanity, which follows directly one of its most magnificent periods of advancement.
For one of life's mysterious laws shows that we only notice the authentic and essential values when it's too late: youth, once it has fled, health at the moment it abandons us, freedom of the soul, that most precious essence, at the very moment when it is taken from us, or has already been taken.
In our time, the miracles of technology have morphed into the most horrific elements of destruction, so elements of the Renaissance and humanism which at first seemed to offer salvation proved a lethal poison.
Even the freest man has his bonds