Thomas Mann Quotes
Quotations and aphorisms by Thomas Mann:
A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth.
~Thomas Mann
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What we call National-Socialism is the poisonous perversion of ideas which have a long history in German intellectual life.
~Thomas Mann
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For I must tell you that we artists cannot tread the path of Beauty without Eros keeping company with us and appointing himself as our guide.
~Thomas Mann
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All interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life.
~Thomas Mann
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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!
~Thomas Mann
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Culture and possessions, there is the bourgeoisie for you.
~Thomas Mann
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Reduced to a miserable mass level, the level of a Hitler, German Romanticism broke out into hysterical barbarism.
~Thomas Mann
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We don't love qualities, we love persons; sometimes by reason of their defects as well as of their qualities.
~Thomas Mann
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The only religious way to think of death is as part and parcel of life.
~Thomas Mann
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Disease makes men more physical, it leaves them nothing but body.
~Thomas Mann
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Speech is civilization itself.
~Thomas Mann
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Animals do not admire each other. A horse does not admire its companion.
~Thomas Mann
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One always has the idea of a stupid man as perfectly healthy and ordinary, and of illness as making one refined and clever and unusual.
~Thomas Mann
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Every reasonable human being should be a moderate Socialist.
~Thomas Mann
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I shall need to sleep three weeks on end to get rested from the rest I've had.
~Thomas Mann
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What is uttered is finished and done with.
~Thomas Mann
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Respectable means rich, and decent means poor. I should die if I heard my family called decent.
~Thomas Mann
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The task of a writer consists of being able to make something out of an idea.
~Thomas Mann
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I don't think anyone is thinking long-term now.
~Thomas Mann
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It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.
~Thomas Mann
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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.
~Thomas Mann
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If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it.
~Thomas Mann
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An art whose medium is language will always show a high degree of critical creativeness, for speech is itself a critique of life: it names, it characterizes, it passes judgment, in that it creates.
~Thomas Mann
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A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
~Thomas Mann
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There is something suspicious about music, gentlemen. I insist that she is, by her nature, equivocal. I shall not be going too far in saying at once that she is politically suspect.
~Thomas Mann
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Opinions cannot survive if one has no chance to fight for them.
~Thomas Mann
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The writer's joy is the thought that can become emotion, the emotion that can wholly become a thought.
~Thomas Mann
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A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.
~Thomas Mann
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It is a strange fact that freedom and equality, the two basic ideas of democracy, are to some extent contradictory. Logically considered, freedom and equality are mutually exclusive, just as society and the individual are mutually exclusive.
~Thomas Mann
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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.
~Thomas Mann
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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.
~Thomas Mann
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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.
~Thomas Mann
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People's behavior makes sense if you think about it in terms of their goals, needs, and motives.
~Thomas Mann
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Order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject.
~Thomas Mann
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It could become much worse.
~Thomas Mann
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One has the idea of a stupid man as perfectly healthy and ordinary, and of illness as making one refined and clever and unusual.
~Thomas Mann
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Psycho-analyses, how disgusting.
~Thomas Mann
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A harmful truth is better than a useful lie.
~Thomas Mann
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Only he who desires is amiable and not he who is satiated.
~Thomas Mann
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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.
~Thomas Mann
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For the beautiful word begets the beautiful deed.
~Thomas Mann
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I love and reverence the Word, the bearer of the spirit, the tool and gleaming ploughshare of progress.
~Thomas Mann
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War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.
~Thomas Mann
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One must die to life in order to be utterly a creator.
~Thomas Mann
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He who loves the more is the inferior and must suffer.
~Thomas Mann
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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.
~Thomas Mann
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Time has no divisions to mark its passage, there is never a thunder-storm or blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year. Even when a new century begins it is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols.
~Thomas Mann
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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.
~Thomas Mann
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For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts.
~Thomas Mann
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Human reason needs only to will more strongly than fate, and she is fate.
~Thomas Mann
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A man's dying is more his survivor's affair than his own.
~Thomas Mann
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Literature... is the union of suffering with the instinct for form.
~Thomas Mann
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Democracy is timelessly human, and timelessness always implies a certain amount of potential youthfulness.
~Thomas Mann
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Everything is politics.
~Thomas Mann
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Time cools, time clarifies; no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours.
~Thomas Mann
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Has the world ever been changed by anything save the thought and its magic vehicle the Word?
~Thomas Mann
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