Impatience of the Heart

by Stefan Zweig

You know how little help you can give in reality, and as an individual you are not going to stem the daily tide of untold suffering. The most you can do is remove a thimbleful, a few drops from this unfathomable ocean – and then the people you fondly imagine you’ve healed today face new problems tomorrow. You are constantly feeling you’ve been too remiss, too careless, and to make matters worse there are the actual mistakes, the misjudgements, which you can’t avoid – with all of this, it is comforting to think that you may have saved at least one person, that there’s one whose trust you haven’t betrayed, one thing you may have got right. After all, we need to know whether we’ve simply lived out our time in a supine and brainless state or existed for some real purpose. Believe me’ – here I suddenly felt his closeness had become warm and almost tender – ‘it is well worth taking on a tough job if, by doing so, you can make life a little better for another person.’