The writer’s joy is the thought that can become emotion, the emotion that can wholly become a thought.
Meaning of the quote
The writer's joy is the ability to take a thought and turn it into a feeling that the reader can understand. Similarly, the writer can take a feeling and transform it into an idea that the reader can comprehend. This exchange between thoughts and emotions is the essence of the writer's craft.
About Thomas Mann
Thomas Mann was a renowned German novelist and Nobel Prize winner in Literature. He was part of the prominent Mann family and known for his highly symbolic and ironic epic novels that explored the psychology of the artist and the intellectual. Mann was a social critic and essayist who used modernized versions of German and Biblical stories to analyze the European and German soul.
More quotes from Thomas Mann
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.
German novelist and Nobel Prize laureate (1875-1955)
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.
German novelist and Nobel Prize laureate (1875-1955)
I love and reverence the Word, the bearer of the spirit, the tool and gleaming ploughshare of progress.
German novelist and Nobel Prize laureate (1875-1955)
Disease makes men more physical, it leaves them nothing but body.
German novelist and Nobel Prize laureate (1875-1955)
For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts.
German novelist and Nobel Prize laureate (1875-1955)
A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth.
German novelist and Nobel Prize laureate (1875-1955)
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.
German novelist and Nobel Prize laureate (1875-1955)
We don’t love qualities, we love persons; sometimes by reason of their defects as well as of their qualities.
German novelist and Nobel Prize laureate (1875-1955)
He who loves the more is the inferior and must suffer.
German novelist and Nobel Prize laureate (1875-1955)
The only religious way to think of death is as part and parcel of life.
German novelist and Nobel Prize laureate (1875-1955)
A harmful truth is better than a useful lie.
German novelist and Nobel Prize laureate (1875-1955)
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.
German novelist and Nobel Prize laureate (1875-1955)
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.
German novelist and Nobel Prize laureate (1875-1955)
All interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life.
German novelist and Nobel Prize laureate (1875-1955)
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.
German novelist and Nobel Prize laureate (1875-1955)
War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.
German novelist and Nobel Prize laureate (1875-1955)
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.
German novelist and Nobel Prize laureate (1875-1955)
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.
German novelist and Nobel Prize laureate (1875-1955)
Opinions cannot survive if one has no chance to fight for them.
German novelist and Nobel Prize laureate (1875-1955)
Democracy is timelessly human, and timelessness always implies a certain amount of potential youthfulness.
German novelist and Nobel Prize laureate (1875-1955)
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.
German novelist and Nobel Prize laureate (1875-1955)
It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.
German novelist and Nobel Prize laureate (1875-1955)
Order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject.
German novelist and Nobel Prize laureate (1875-1955)
I shall need to sleep three weeks on end to get rested from the rest I’ve had.
German novelist and Nobel Prize laureate (1875-1955)
A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.
German novelist and Nobel Prize laureate (1875-1955)
Respectable means rich, and decent means poor. I should die if I heard my family called decent.
German novelist and Nobel Prize laureate (1875-1955)
Literature… is the union of suffering with the instinct for form.
German novelist and Nobel Prize laureate (1875-1955)
The task of a writer consists of being able to make something out of an idea.
German novelist and Nobel Prize laureate (1875-1955)
Has the world ever been changed by anything save the thought and its magic vehicle the Word?
German novelist and Nobel Prize laureate (1875-1955)
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.
German novelist and Nobel Prize laureate (1875-1955)
Time cools, time clarifies; no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours.
German novelist and Nobel Prize laureate (1875-1955)
It could become much worse.
German novelist and Nobel Prize laureate (1875-1955)
For the beautiful word begets the beautiful deed.
German novelist and Nobel Prize laureate (1875-1955)
Every reasonable human being should be a moderate Socialist.
German novelist and Nobel Prize laureate (1875-1955)
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.
German novelist and Nobel Prize laureate (1875-1955)
Only he who desires is amiable and not he who is satiated.
German novelist and Nobel Prize laureate (1875-1955)
Speech is civilization itself.
German novelist and Nobel Prize laureate (1875-1955)
I don’t think anyone is thinking long-term now.
German novelist and Nobel Prize laureate (1875-1955)
The writer’s joy is the thought that can become emotion, the emotion that can wholly become a thought.
German novelist and Nobel Prize laureate (1875-1955)
Reduced to a miserable mass level, the level of a Hitler, German Romanticism broke out into hysterical barbarism.
German novelist and Nobel Prize laureate (1875-1955)
A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
German novelist and Nobel Prize laureate (1875-1955)
Human reason needs only to will more strongly than fate, and she is fate.
German novelist and Nobel Prize laureate (1875-1955)
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.
German novelist and Nobel Prize laureate (1875-1955)
Animals do not admire each other. A horse does not admire its companion.
German novelist and Nobel Prize laureate (1875-1955)
One has the idea of a stupid man as perfectly healthy and ordinary, and of illness as making one refined and clever and unusual.
German novelist and Nobel Prize laureate (1875-1955)
Everything is politics.
German novelist and Nobel Prize laureate (1875-1955)
Culture and possessions, there is the bourgeoisie for you.
German novelist and Nobel Prize laureate (1875-1955)
People’s behavior makes sense if you think about it in terms of their goals, needs, and motives.
German novelist and Nobel Prize laureate (1875-1955)
Psycho-analyses, how disgusting.
German novelist and Nobel Prize laureate (1875-1955)
What we call National-Socialism is the poisonous perversion of ideas which have a long history in German intellectual life.
German novelist and Nobel Prize laureate (1875-1955)
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!
German novelist and Nobel Prize laureate (1875-1955)
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.
German novelist and Nobel Prize laureate (1875-1955)
What is uttered is finished and done with.
German novelist and Nobel Prize laureate (1875-1955)
One must die to life in order to be utterly a creator.
German novelist and Nobel Prize laureate (1875-1955)
A man’s dying is more his survivor’s affair than his own.
German novelist and Nobel Prize laureate (1875-1955)
If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it.
German novelist and Nobel Prize laureate (1875-1955)