Quotes from zweig stefan iv

I regard memory not as a phenomenon preserving one thing and losing another merely by chance, but as a power that deliberately places events in order or wisely omits them. Everything we forget about our own lives was really condemned to oblivion by an inner instinct long ago.

The soul is made of stuff so mysteriously elastic that a single event can make it big enough to contain the infinite.

Boldly, perhaps still warm from human bodies, the unmade double bed bore visible witness to the point and purpose of this room.

What is noble, lyrical, tender in the upper level shown is also with the servants, scoundrels, and scamps, as in a distorting mirror. This contrast seems to me a most appealing musical theme--to show love in its noble and crude forms, romanticism and crass realism mixed as in everyday life.

He who studies without passion will never become anything more than a pedant.

The strength of a love is always misjudged if we evaluate it by its immediate cause and not the stress that went before it, the dark and hollow space full of disappointment and loneliness that precedes all the great events in the heart's history.

Everything in life that deviates from the straight and, so to speak, normal line, makes people first curious and then indignant.

Only a numskull is pleased at being a so-called "success" with women, only a dunderhead is puffed up by it. A real man is much more likely to be dismayed at realizing that a woman has lost her heart to him when he can't reciprocate her feelings.

It is usual for a woman, even though she may ardently desire to give herself to a man, to feign reluctance, to simulate alarm or indignation. She must be brought to consent by urgent pleading, by lies, adjurations, and promises. I know that only professional prostitutes are accustomed to answer such an invitation with a perfectly frank assent -- prostitutes, or simple-minded, immature girls.

It is precisely those who are apparently aloof from the world who build for themselves a remarkable and thoroughly individual world in miniature, using their own special equipment, termite-like.

Those whom fate has dealt hard knocks remain vulnerable for ever afterwards.

Hairdressers are professional gossips; when only the hands are busy, the tongue is seldom still.