In history, the moments during which reason and reconciliation prevail are short and fleeting.
Interpretation
Reason and reconciliation are rare and temporary in history.
Stefan Zweig reflects on the nature of historical moments, suggesting that periods of rationality and peace are transient and difficult to maintain. This observation implies that conflict and discord are often more prevalent in human history than harmony and understanding.
In practice
During a speech about conflict resolution in a community meeting.
All my life I have been passionately interested in monomaniacs of any kind, people carried away by a single idea. The more one limits oneself, the closer one is to the infinite; these people, as unworldly as they seem, burrow like termites into their own particular material to construct, in miniature, a strange and utterly individual image of the world.
When they are preparing for war, those who rule by force speak most copiously about peace until they have completed the mobilization process.
Only ambition is fired by the coincidences of success and easy accomplishment but nothing is quite as splendidly uplifting to the heart as the defeat of a human being who battles against the invincible superiority of fate. This is always the most grandiose of all tragedies, one sometimes created by a dramatist but created thousands of times by life.
Now I am discovering the world once more. England has widened my horizon.
Only the person who has experienced light and darkness, war and peace, rise and fall, only that person has truly experienced life.
Memory is so corrupt that you remember only what you want to; if you want to forget about something, slowly but surely you do.
Our vows are heard betimes! and Heaven takes care To grant, before we can conclude the prayer: Preventing angels met it half the way, And sent us back to praise, who came to pray.
Yet I also suspected that what I was seeing was but a part of the truth and perhaps not even the most important part; beneath these faces, these clothes, accents, rudenesses, was power and sorrow, both unadmitted, unrealized, the power of inventors, the sorrow of the disconnected.
We humans are more concerned with having than with being.
Horror is always aware of its cause; terror never is. That is precisely what makes terror terrifying.
The heart is just the heart; thoughts and feelings are just thoughts and feelings. Let things be just as they are.
Sometimes the Warrior feels as if he were living two lives at once.
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