Top 100 Thomas Mann Quotes
#1. Democracy is timelessly human, and timelessness always implies a certain amount of potential youthfulness.
Thomas Mann
#2. Deep is the well of the past. Should we not call it bottomless?
Thomas Mann
#3. A man's dying is more the survivors' affair than his own.
Thomas Mann
#4. The writer's joy is the thought that can become emotion, the emotion that can wholly become a thought.
Thomas Mann
#5. For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts.
Thomas Mann
#6. Passionate - that means to live for the sake of living. But one knows that you all live for sake of experience. Passion, that is self-forgetfulness. But what you all want is self-enrichment.
Thomas Mann
#7. It might well be that getting used to things up here was simply a matter of getting used to not getting used to them - but
Thomas Mann
#8. 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.
Thomas Mann
#9. In books we never find anything but ourselves. Strangely enough, that always gives us great pleasure, and we say the author is a genius.
Thomas Mann
#10. 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.
Thomas Mann
#11. The child of civilization, remote from birth from wild nature and all her ways, is more susceptible to her grandeur than is her untutored son who has looked at her and lived close to her from childhood up, on terms of prosaic familiarity. The
Thomas Mann
#12. It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.
Thomas Mann
#13. When life still hesitates to touch us, when neither duty nor guilt dares lay a hand upon us
Thomas Mann
#14. Myth is the foundation of life; it is the timeless pattern, the pious formula, into which life flows when it reproduces its traits out of the unconscious.
Thomas Mann
#15. 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
#16. In Kant and Nietzsche we have the moralists of German militarism.
Thomas Mann
#17. Disease makes men more physical, it leaves them nothing but body.
Thomas Mann
#18. Every reasonable human being should be a moderate Socialist.
Thomas Mann
#19. Disease, and most specially opprobrious, suppressed, secret disease, creates a certain critical opposition to the world, to mediocre life, disposes a man to be obstinate and ironical toward civil order, so that he seeks refuge in free thought, in books, in study.
Thomas Mann
#20. For passion, like crime does not sit well with the sure order and even course of everyday life. It welcomes every loosening of the social fabric, every confusion and affliction visited upon the world, for passion sees in such a disorder a vague hope of finding advantage for itself.
Thomas Mann
#21. The experience of death must ultimately be the experience of life, or else it is only a wraith.
Thomas Mann
#22. I get an odd, intimate, and amusing sensation from having him sit on my foot and warm it with the blood-heat of his body. A pervasive feeling of sympathy and good cheer fills me, as almost invariably when in his company and looking at things from his angle.
Thomas Mann
#23. Aschenbach stated outright that nearly everything great owes its existence to "despites": despite misery
Thomas Mann
#24. War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.
Thomas Mann
#25. ... But sometimes a person begins with opinions and judgments and valid criticisms, but then things creep in that have nothing to do with forming opinions, and then it's all over with strict logic, and what you end up with is an absurd world republic and beautiful style.
Thomas Mann
#26. 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
#27. At thirty a man steps out of the darkness and wasteland of preparation into active life it is the time to show oneself, the time of fulfillment.
Thomas Mann
#28. Greatness! Extraordinariness! Conquest of the world and immortality of the name! What good was all the happiness of people eternally unknown compared with this goal?
Thomas Mann
#29. I don't think anyone is thinking long-term now.
Thomas Mann
#30. A stimulus is a stimulus. The body doesn't give a damn about the meaning of the stimulus. Whether minnows or communion, the sebaceous glands stand up erect.
Thomas Mann
#31. Often I have thought of the day when I gazed for the first time at the sea.
The sea is vast, the sea is wide, my eyes roved far and wide and longed to be
free. But there was the horizon. Why a horizon, when I wanted the infinite
from life?
Thomas Mann
#32. It's hard to keep going when it seems like you're not getting anywhere, but you'll never succeed if you stop. Those of us with a dream that seems so far from being realized must remember that the road is long, but only those who stay on the path will reach their destination.
Thomas Mann
#33. Which seemed to hover in a limbo between creation and decay ...
Thomas Mann
#34. One must die to life in order to be utterly a creator.
Thomas Mann
#35. 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.
Thomas Mann
#36. What we call National-Socialism is the poisonous perversion of ideas which have a long history in German intellectual life.
Thomas Mann
#38. He who loves the more is the inferior and must suffer.
Thomas Mann
#39. Solitude favors the original, the daringly and otherworldly beautiful, the poem. But it also favors the wrongful, the extreme, the absurd, and the forbidden.
Thomas Mann
#40. romping in pedagogically forbidden territory. They
Thomas Mann
#41. But was it not true that there were people, certain individuals, whom one found it impossible to picture dead, precisely because they were so vulgar? That was to say: they seemed so fit for life, so good at it, that they would never die, as if they were unworthy of the consecration of death.
Thomas Mann
#42. Everything is human. The Spaniard's fear of God, his humility, his solemnity, his scrupulous austerity is a very worthy form of humanity,
Thomas Mann
#43. Strangely fruitful intercourse this, between one body and another mind
Thomas Mann
#44. Thoughts come c.early while one walks.
Thomas Mann
#45. Literature ... is the union of suffering with the instinct for form.
Thomas Mann
#46. 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.
Thomas Mann
#47. Reduced to a miserable mass level, the level of a Hitler, German Romanticism broke out into hysterical barbarism.
Thomas Mann
#48. It is as well that the world knows only a fine piece of work and not also its origins, the conditions under which it came into being; for knowledge of the sources of an artist's inspiration would often confuse readers and shock them, and the excellence of the writing would be of no avail.
Thomas Mann
#49. Even the piquant can forfeit popularity if tied to something intellectual.
Thomas Mann
#50. ... What our age needs, what it demands, what it will create for itself, is - terror.
Thomas Mann
#51. How good, he thinks, that she breathes in oblivion with every breath she draws! That in childhood each night is a deep wide gulf between one day and the next.
Thomas Mann
#52. I dreamed about the nature of man, and about a courteous, reasonable, and respectable community of men - while the ghastly bloody feast went on in the temple behind them. Were they courteous and charming to one another, those sunny folk, out of silent regard for that horror?
Thomas Mann
#53. You have never spent any time in theatrical circles, have you? So you do not know those thespian faces that can embody the features of a Julius Caesar, a Goethe and a Beethoven all in one, but whose owners, the moment they open their mouths, prove to be the most miserable ninnies under the sun.
Thomas Mann
#54. Whoever loves the more is at a disadvantage and must suffer
Thomas Mann
#55. A secret and ardent stirring within the frozen chastity of the universal.
Thomas Mann
#56. It is impossible for ideas to compete in the marketplace if no forum for their presentation is provided or available.
Thomas Mann
#57. 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
#58. Love is always simply itself, both as a subtle affirmation of life and as the highest passion; love is our sympathy with organic life, the touchingly lustful embrace of what is destined to decay -
Thomas Mann
#59. Only love, and not reason, yields kind thoughts.
Thomas Mann
#60. He had ... regarded travel as a hygienic necessity, which had to be observed against will and inclination.
Thomas Mann
#61. Men do not know why they award fame to one work of art rather than another. Without being in the faintest connoisseurs, they think to justify the warmth of their commendations by discovering it in a hundred virtues, whereas the real ground of their applause is inexplicable
it is sumpathy.
Thomas Mann
#62. If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it.
Thomas Mann
#63. Has the world ever been changed by anything save the thought and its magic vehicle the Word?
Thomas Mann
#64. Hans Castorp had found courage up here
if courage before the elements is defined not as a dull, level-headed relationship with them, but a conscious abandonment to them.
Thomas Mann
#65. Time cools, time clarifies; no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours.
Thomas Mann
#66. Animals do not admire each other. A horse does not admire its companion.
Thomas Mann
#67. The sweet spot is where duty and delight converge.
Thomas Mann
#68. It was, however, striking - in the best sense of the word - that precisely those rules that corresponded exactly to their overseers' economic interests enjoyed unconditional veneration, whereas rules for which said correspondence was less applicable were more likely to be winked at.
Thomas Mann
#69. 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
#70. Like any lover, he desired to please; suffered agonies at the thought of failure.
Thomas Mann
#71. LCSH terms that are "orphans" in terms of their individual coverage are seldom orphans in terms of their relationships.
Thomas Mann
#72. The happiness of writers is the thought that can be entirely emotion and the emotion that can be entirely thought. Such a pulsing thought, such a
Thomas Mann
#73. Yes, they are carnal, both of them, love and death, and therein lies their terror and their great magic!
Thomas Mann
#74. ( ... ) nearly all the great things that exist owe their existence to a defiant despite: it is despite grief and anguish, despite poverty, loneliness, bodily weakness, vice and passion and a thousand inhibitions, that they have come into being at all.
Thomas Mann
#75. But admiration and sadness, admiration and worry, is not that almost a definition of love?"
"There are people with whom it is not easy to live, but whom it is impossible to leave.
Thomas Mann
#76. 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
#77. For when you come to think of it, which is the real shape of the glowworm: the insignificant little creature crawling about on the palm of you hand, or the poetic spark that swims through the summer night?
Thomas Mann
#78. For happiness, he told himself, isn't being loved; that was just a slightly nauseous satisfaction of vanity. Happiness is loving and perhaps seizing a few short illusory moments of intimacy with the object of one's love.
Thomas Mann
#79. Music awakens time, awakens us to our finest enjoyment of time.
Thomas Mann
#80. Discussions should always be held just before going to bed, your rear protected by sleep. How painful, after an intellectual conversation, to have to go about with your mind so stirred up.
Thomas Mann
#81. What they, in their innocence, cannot comprehend is that a properly constituted, healthy, decent man never writes, acts, or composes.
Thomas Mann
#82. For the beautiful word begets the beautiful deed.
Thomas Mann
#83. Respectable means rich, and decent means poor. I should die if I heard my family called decent.
Thomas Mann
#84. What is uttered is finished and done with.
Thomas Mann
#85. Ultimately we are only as old as we feel in our hearts and minds.
Thomas Mann
#86. I shall need to sleep three weeks on end to get rested from the rest I've had.
Thomas Mann
#88. 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
#89. Forbearance in the face of fate, beauty constant under torture, are not merely passive. They are a positive achievement, an explicit triumph.
Thomas Mann
#90. 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
#91. The fact is that everyone is much too busily preoccupied with himself to be able to form a serious opinion about another person. The indolent world is all too ready to treat any man with whatever degree of respect corresponds to his own self-confidence.
Thomas Mann
#92. We, when we sow the seeds of doubt deeper than the most up-to-date and modish free-thought has ever dreamed of doing, we well know what we are about. Only out of radical skepsis, out of moral chaos, can the Absolute spring, the anointed Terror of which the time has need.
Thomas Mann
#93. (T)here was a story they used to tell at home about a girl whose punishment was that every time she opened her mouth, snakes and toads came out, snakes and toads with every word. The book didn't say what she did about it, but I've always assumed she probably ended up keeping her mouth shut.
Thomas Mann
#94. And for its part, what was life? Was it perhaps only an infectious disease of matter - just as the so-called spontaneous generation of matter was perhaps only an illness, a cancerous stimulation of the immaterial?
Thomas Mann
#95. 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
#96. What an absurd torture for the artist to know that an audience identifies him with a work that, within himself, he has moved beyond and that was merely a game played with something in which he does not believe.
Thomas Mann
#97. The task of a writer consists of being able to make something out of an idea.
Thomas Mann
#98. These artists pay little attention to an encircling present that bears no direct relation to the world of work in which they live, and they therefore see in it nothing more than an indifferent framework for life, either more or less favorable to production.
Thomas Mann
#99. For at the moment of the final division, the final miniaturization of matter, suddenly the whole cosmos opened up.
Thomas Mann
#100. The days began to fly now, and yet each one of them was stretched by renewed expectations and swollen with silent, private experiences. Yes, time is a puzzling thing, there is something about it that is hard to explain.
Thomas Mann
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