The difference that I am describing here is a shared experience.I believe that the youth of every nation spontaneously chooses favourite epochs and favourite figures in history, and I even believe that in all countries and in all young generations such love and enthusiasm is directed towards the same figures and episodes. And it would therefore be senseless if one were to demand, to demand oneself, ceaselessly and without pause, only great, exciting, shocking, moving figures and events from history, from ‘God’s mysterious workshop’, as Goethe called her.No, not even history can constantly produce geniuses and towering, superhuman characters.

PushkinPress.com English editions of Stefan Zweig's novellas; Legamus.eu Audiobook version of the novella (in German) This page was last edited on 2 July 2020, at 00:31 (UTC). Stefan Zweig was an Austrian author, journalist, and playwright.. The death and life of Stefan Zweig. History appeared to us as a pitiless judge who, with a fixed countenance, without love and without hate, without judgement and without prejudice, recorded events  with her iron stylus. I’ve enjoyed this short biography of Montaigne by Stefan Zweig, and an introduction to the book, which is not much shorter than the book itself, explains how Zweig, who had written many biographies, came to write this one. Zweig was born in Vienna, the son of Moritz Zweig (1845–1926), a wealthy Jewish textile manufacturer, and Ida Brettauer (1854–1938), a daughter of a Jewish banking family.
But educator and teacher, she almost always wore a stern face.

You cannot change it, or improve anything. Weeks and months are for the truly creative person often wholly idle periods in which he, citizen and journeyman, lives just as unproductively as every other; all excitement requires times of preparation, of collection.Poetic power, like any other, has to accumulate before its first, strong attempt, it has to rest and collect itself in order to then emerge suddenly and victoriously.


He was related to the Czech writer Egon Hostovský, who described him as "a very distant relative"; some sources describe them as cousins. The visionary, the truly creative state cannot become a permanent, a normal state, whether for individuals, or for whole nations.

Life is servitude if we lack the freedom to die….When a man can no longer bear these sufferings, then he must boldly and promptly make an end of it.

There were long stretches and periods in those books that we read begrudgingly, without sympathy, without joy, without love, without passion, that we learnt just as one learns something required, something imposed, as one learns a ‘school subject’, but, I repeat, without inner joy, without the use of the imagination.“There were long stretches and periods in those books that we read begrudgingly, without sympathy, without joy, without love, without passion.”.Then there came episodes in history that we experienced as passionately as adventures, single passages in books where we could hardly turn the pages quickly enough, where our innermost being, our most secret powers were impassioned, where our imaginations slipped into the admired figures themselves, where we lads felt like Conradin, like Alexander, like Caesar and Alcibiades. 0. Goethe.Books are, I find, the best provisions a man can take with him on life’s journey.Montaigne’s greatest pleasure is in the search, not the discovery.For the genuine traveller nothing is a disappointment.He knows that he has managed what Plato says somewhere: that there is nothing more difficult in the world than to leave public life with a clean pair of hands.Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:Amateurism still flourishing in scientific journals,https://richardswsmith.wordpress.com/2018/12/26/montaignes-formula-for-living-the-free-life-extracted-by-stefan-zweig/.