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.

Religion did not play a central role in his education. Zweig had a warm relationship with Theodor Herzl the founder of Zionism whom he met when Herzl was still literary editor of the Neue Freie Presse then Vienna's main newspaper; Herzl accepted for publication some of Zweig's early essays. Biography
Zweig was the son of Moritz Zweig (1845–1926) a wealthy Jewish textile manufacturer and Ida Brettauer (1854–1938) from a Jewish banking family.

At the height of his literary career in the 1920s and 1930s he was one of the most famous writers in the world.