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Home
Authors
Thomas Mann
German
Writer
About the author
I love and reverence the Word, the bearer of the spirit, the tool and gleaming ploughshare of progress.
Thomas Mann,
German
Writer
#Love
#Spirit
#Word
#Progress
Everything is politics.
Thomas Mann,
German
Writer
#Politics
I shall need to sleep three weeks on end to get rested from the rest I've had.
Thomas Mann,
German
Writer
#End
#Rest
#Sleep
If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it.
Thomas Mann,
German
Writer
#Idea
It could become much worse.
Thomas Mann,
German
Writer
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,
German
Writer
#Freedom
#Democracy
#Society
#Ideas
#Equality
#Fact
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,
German
Writer
#Man
#Idea
#Illness
It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.
Thomas Mann,
German
Writer
#Love
#Death
#Reason
Literature... is the union of suffering with the instinct for form.
Thomas Mann,
German
Writer
#Instinct
#Literature
#Suffering
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,
German
Writer
#Positive
#Act
#Aggression
#Endurance
For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts.
Thomas Mann,
German
Writer
#Love
#Death
#Man
#Goodness
#Thoughts
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,
German
Writer
#Life
#Unconscious
#Myth
#Formula
He who loves the more is the inferior and must suffer.
Thomas Mann,
German
Writer
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,
German
Writer
#Artists
#Beauty
#Company
Human reason needs only to will more strongly than fate, and she is fate.
Thomas Mann,
German
Writer
#Will
#Reason
#Needs
#Fate
Every reasonable human being should be a moderate Socialist.
Thomas Mann,
German
Writer
#Being
Disease makes men more physical, it leaves them nothing but body.
Thomas Mann,
German
Writer
#Nothing
#Men
#Disease
#Body
Democracy is timelessly human, and timelessness always implies a certain amount of potential youthfulness.
Thomas Mann,
German
Writer
#Democracy
#Potential
Culture and possessions, there is the bourgeoisie for you.
Thomas Mann,
German
Writer
#Culture
#Possessions
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,
German
Writer
#Life
#Love
#Children
Animals do not admire each other. A horse does not admire its companion.
Thomas Mann,
German
Writer
#Animals
Has the world ever been changed by anything save the thought and its magic vehicle the Word?
Thomas Mann,
German
Writer
#World
#Thought
#Magic
#Word
I don't think anyone is thinking long-term now.
Thomas Mann,
German
Writer
#Now
#Thinking
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,
German
Writer
#Life
#Nothing
#Man
For the beautiful word begets the beautiful deed.
Thomas Mann,
German
Writer
#Word
#Deed
People's behavior makes sense if you think about it in terms of their goals, needs, and motives.
Thomas Mann,
German
Writer
#People
#Goals
#Needs
#Sense
#Behavior
#Motives
One must die to life in order to be utterly a creator.
Thomas Mann,
German
Writer
#Life
#Order
Only he who desires is amiable and not he who is satiated.
Thomas Mann,
German
Writer
Order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject.
Thomas Mann,
German
Writer
#First
#Order
Psycho-analyses, how disgusting.
Thomas Mann,
German
Writer
Reduced to a miserable mass level, the level of a Hitler, German Romanticism broke out into hysterical barbarism.
Thomas Mann,
German
Writer
Respectable means rich, and decent means poor. I should die if I heard my family called decent.
Thomas Mann,
German
Writer
#Family
#Poor
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,
German
Writer
#Man
#Idea
#Illness
Opinions cannot survive if one has no chance to fight for them.
Thomas Mann,
German
Writer
#Chance
#Fight
#Opinions
The only religious way to think of death is as part and parcel of life.
Thomas Mann,
German
Writer
#Life
#Death
#Religious
What we call National-Socialism is the poisonous perversion of ideas which have a long history in German intellectual life.
Thomas Mann,
German
Writer
#Life
#History
#Ideas
What is uttered is finished and done with.
Thomas Mann,
German
Writer
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,
German
Writer
#Eye
We don't love qualities, we love persons; sometimes by reason of their defects as well as of their qualities.
Thomas Mann,
German
Writer
#Love
#Reason
War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.
Thomas Mann,
German
Writer
#Problems
#War
#Peace
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,
German
Writer
#Time
#Beginning
#Fire
#Bells
Time cools, time clarifies; no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours.
Thomas Mann,
German
Writer
#Time
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,
German
Writer
#Saying
#Nature
#Music
#Gentlemen
A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth.
Thomas Mann,
German
Writer
#Truth
The task of a writer consists of being able to make something out of an idea.
Thomas Mann,
German
Writer
#Being
#Idea
#Writer
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,
German
Writer
#Life
#Man
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,
German
Writer
#Future
#Humanity
#Theory
#Generations
Speech is civilization itself.
Thomas Mann,
German
Writer
#Civilization
#Speech
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,
German
Writer
#Poetry
#Beauty
#Solitude
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,
German
Writer
#Will
#Art
#Language
#Judgment
#Speech
#Names
All interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life.
Thomas Mann,
German
Writer
#Life
#Death
#Disease
#Expression
#Interest
A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
Thomas Mann,
German
Writer
#People
#Writing
#Writer
A man's dying is more his survivor's affair than his own.
Thomas Mann,
German
Writer
#Man
#Dying
A harmful truth is better than a useful lie.
Thomas Mann,
German
Writer
#Truth
#Lie
The writer's joy is the thought that can become emotion, the emotion that can wholly become a thought.
Thomas Mann,
German
Writer
#Thought
#Writer
#Joy
#Emotion
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,
German
Writer
#Man