Thomas Mann Quotes

A solitary, unused to speaking of what he sees and feels, has mental experiences which are at once more intense and less articulate than those of a gregarious man.

Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.

For the myth is the foundation of life; it is the timeless schema, the pious formula into which life flows when it reproduces its traits out of the unconscious.

Order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject.

Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.

Stupid — well, there are so many kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst.

Laughter is a sunbeam of the soul.

War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.

A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

In books we never find anything but ourselves. Strangely enough, that always gives us great pleasure, and we say the author is a genius.

A harmful truth is better than a useful lie.

It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.

Art is the funnel, as it were, through which spirit is poured into life.

But my deepest and most secret love belongs to the fair-haired and the blue-eyed, the bright children of life, the happy, the charming and the ordinary.

A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth.

Is not life in itself a thing of goodness, irrespective of whether the course it takes for us can be called a 'happy' one?

Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportianate, the absurd and the forbidden.

We don't love qualities, we love persons; sometimes by reason of their defects as well as of their qualities.

For to be poised against fatality, to meet adverse conditions gracefully, is more than simple endurance; it is an act of aggression, a positive triumph.

Reduced to a miserable mass level, the level of a Hitler, German Romanticism broke out into hysterical barbarism.

A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.

I never can understand how anyone can not smoke it deprives a man of the best part of life. With a good cigar in his mouth a man is perfectly safe, nothing can touch him, literally.

People's behavior makes sense if you think about it in terms of their goals, needs, and motives.

We do not fear being called meticulous, inclining as we do to the view that only the exhaustive can be truly interesting.

What good would politics be, if it didn’t give everyone the opportunity to make moral compromises.

Time cools, time clarifies; no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours.

What a wonderful phenomenon it is, carefully considered, when the human eye, that jewel of organic structures, concentrates its moist brilliance on another human creature!

Technology and comfort - having those, people speak of culture, but do not have it.

There is only one real misfortune: to forfeit one's own good opinion of oneself. Lose your complacency, once betray your own self-contempt and the world will unhesitatingly endorse it.

I tell them that if they will occupy themselves with the study of mathematics they will find in it the best remedy against the lusts of the flesh.

He who loves the more is the inferior and must suffer.

If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it.

Animals do not admire each other. A horse does not admire its companion.

Innate in nearly every artistic nature is a wanton, treacherous penchant for accepting injustice when it creates beauty and showing sympathy for and paying homage to aristocratic privilege.

One has the idea of a stupid man as perfectly healthy and ordinary, and of illness as making one refined and clever and unusual.

Thought that can merge wholly into feeling, feeling that can merge wholly into thought - these are the artist's highest joy.

Everything is politics.

What pleases the public is lively and vivid delineation which makes no demands on the intellect; but passionate and absolutist youth can only be enthralled by a problem.

All interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life.

Distance in a straight line has no mystery. The mystery is in the sphere.

A man’s dying is more the survivors’ affair than his own.

The Freudian theory is one of the most important foundation stones for an edifice to be built by future generations, the dwelling of a freer and wiser humanity.

What we call National-Socialism is the poisonous perversion of ideas which have a long history in German intellectual life.

I stand between two worlds. I am at home in neither, and I suffer in consequence. You artists call me a bourgeois, and the bourgeois try to arrest me...I don't know which makes me feel worse.

One must die to life in order to be utterly a creator.

No man remains quite what he was when he recognizes himself.

Every reasonable human being should be a moderate Socialist.

He took in the squeaky music, the vulgar and pining melodies, because passion immobilizes good taste and seriously considers what soberly would be thought of as funny and to be resented.

I don't think anyone is thinking long-term now.

I shall need to sleep three weeks on end to get rested from the rest I've had.