# Stefan Zweig's best-known quotes

From 'No one we love is ever gone' to the lost passport in The World of Yesterday: Stefan Zweig's best-known lines from his plays, stories, biographies and memoirs, with their source.

- 29 votes · 12 items
- Apr 6, 2026 · Matthias Müller
- https://even.best/en/l/4697/stefan-zweig-s-best-known-quotes

## Top 12

1. **She was still too young to know that life gives nothing for free and that everything fate grants has a secret price on it.** (5 · ▲5 ▼0) — Marie Antoinette (1932).
2. **Only distance wins you back to yourself!** (3 · ▲3 ▼0) — 'Hymn to Travel', poems (1924).
3. **What is the point of living if the wind behind our shoes already blows away our last trace?** (3 · ▲3 ▼0) — 'Mendel the Bibliophile' (1929).
4. **The day I lost my passport I discovered, at fifty-eight, that losing one's homeland means more than losing a patch of land.** (3 · ▲3 ▼0) — The World of Yesterday (1942).
5. **Whoever sets himself goals walks past chance.** (2 · ▲3 ▼1) — Adepts in Self-Portraiture (1928), Casanova.
6. **No one we love is ever gone. Love is an eternal present.** (2 · ▲2 ▼0) — Legend of a Life (1919).
7. **A person sworn to politics no longer belongs to himself.** (1 · ▲2 ▼1) — Mary, Queen of Scots (1935).
8. **But fate gives more to the impudent than to the industrious, more gladly to the coarse than to the patient.** (1 · ▲1 ▼0) — Adepts in Self-Portraiture (1928), Casanova.
9. **Elizabeth the realist wins in history; Mary Stuart the romantic, in poetry and legend.** (1 · ▲1 ▼0) — Mary, Queen of Scots (1935).
10. **Mary Stuart is less afraid of dying than Elizabeth is of killing her.** (1 · ▲1 ▼0) — Mary, Queen of Scots (1935).
11. **Nothing made the German people so embittered, so full of hatred, so ripe for Hitler as the inflation.** (1 · ▲1 ▼0) — The World of Yesterday (1942).
12. **No artist is an artist without interruption for all twenty-four hours of his day.** (0 · ▲1 ▼1) — Decisive Moments in History (1927), foreword.

How is this ranking ordered? By people's votes: each ▲ adds a point and each ▼ takes one away. Anyone can vote and add what is missing.