The World of Yesterday

by Stefan Zweig

I know of no pre-eminence that I can claim, in the midst of the multitude, except this: that as an Austrian, a Jew, an author, a humanist, and a pacifist, I have always stood at the exact point where these earthquakes were the most violent.

The homeless man becomes free in a new sense; and only he who has lost all ties need have no arrière-pensée.

And so I belong nowhere, and everywhere am a stranger, a guest at best.

Not until our time has mankind as a whole behaved so infernally, and never before has it accomplished so much that is godlike.

All that one forgets of one’s life was long since predestined by an inner instinct to be forgotten. Only that which wills to preserve itself has the right to be preserved for others.

That which, in his childhood, a man has drawn into his blood out of the air of time cannot be taken from him.

Even in the abyss of despair in which today, half-blinded, we grope about with distorted and broken souls, I look up again and again to those old star-patterns that shone over my childhood, and comfort myself with the inherited confidence that this collapse will appear, in days to come, as a mere interval in the eternal rhythm of the onward and onward.

Inevitably there comes into the life of each one of us the time when, face to face with our own being, one re-encounters his father.

But it is my father in me, and it is his secret pride that forces me back, and I may not offer opposition; for I thank him for what may well be my only definite possession – the feeling of inner freedom.

Youth, like certain animals, possesses an excellent instinct for change of weather,

I am on the way to improve myself. I must first learn unconditional devotion, and perhaps the others will learn with me.”

tradition always means repression.

It is only through an intellectual friendship with the living that one gains insight into the true connection between folk and land; all observation from without can give no more than a spurious premature view.

when rhyme joining rhyme created the indescribable stir, softer than the sound of a leaf falling in the wind, that vibrates to the most distant soul.

So it went on for a quarter or a half hour, I cannot recall how long. Great moments are always outside of time.

one has to have an anchorage from which one can set out and to which one can always return.

to fight for an idea makes man hard and determined.

here one felt more entitled to live whereas in a country at war it had become embarrassing and almost an offense to be free of wounds.

”we few, we happy few, we band of brothers”

First, the old generation will have to be swept out of diplomacy and the generals will have to become silent monuments on the public squares.”

Nothing harms a thinking man more than lack of opposition;

Like all important things in life one never derives such knowledge from other peoples’ experience but only from one’s own fate.

So, on this fiftieth birthday, deep within myself I had but one wicked wish – for something that would once more tear me away from all these guarantees and comforts, that would necessitate my not merely continuing, but my starting anew.

“So foul a sky clears not without a storm.”

the phenomenon that people thousands of miles away are better informed than those who live ten blocks from the scene of momentous decisions.

And the moment when the train rolled across the Austrian border I knew, as did Lot in the Bible,

that all that I had left behind was dust and ashes, a past frozen to a pillar of salt.

For amidst his military and political victories Hitler’s most diabolic triumph was that he succeeded through progressive excesses in blunting every sense of law and order.

“Formerly man had only a body and a soul. Now he needs a passport as well for without it he will not be treated like a human being.”

But, after all, shadows themselves are born of light.