Thomas Mann Quotes

Speech is civilization itself. The word even the most contradictory word preserves contact - it is...

For to be poised against fatality, to meet adverse conditions gracefully, is more than simple endura...

Discussions should always be held just before going to bed, your rear protected by sleep. How painfu...

For passion, like crime does not sit well with the sure order and even course of everyday life. It w...

A human being who is first of all an invalid is all body therein lies his inhumanity and his debase...

But even those five-and-forty minutes were too long, the bored me --and boredom is the coldest thing...

The accouterments of life were so rich and varied, so elaborated, that almost no place at all was le...

Order and simplification are the first steps towards mastery of a subject

Deep is the well of the past. Should we not call it bottomless?

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

A lonely, quiet person has observations and experiences that are at once both more indistinct and mo...

Nothing is stranger or more ticklish than a relationship between people who know each other only by ...

The observations and encounters of a man of solitude and few words are at once more nebulous and mor...

Even in a personal sense, after all, art is an intensified life. By art one is more deeply satisfied...

Nothing is more curious and awkward than the relationship of two people who only know each other wit...

There are so many different kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst.

There were profound reasons for his attachment to the sea: he loved it because as a hardworking arti...

Forbearance in the face of fate, beauty constant under torture, are not merely passive. They are a p...

What did one see if one looked in any depth into the world of this writer's fiction? Elegant self-co...

Innate in nearly every artistic nature is a wanton, treacherous penchant for accepting injustice whe...

Or was he merely a mollycoddled favorite, enjoying capriciously prejudiced love? Schenback was incli...

Opinions cannot survive if one has no chance to fight for them.

He took in the squeaky music, the vulgar and pining melodies, because passion immobilizes good taste...

The perishableness of life...imparts value, dignity, interest to life.

For I must tell you that we artists cannot tread the path of Beauty without Eros keeping company wit...

Yes, they are carnal, both of them, love and death, and therein lies their terror and their great ma...

Prayers and love are learned in the hour when prayer has become impossible and your heart has turned...

How can I free myself from sexuality? Eat nothing but rice?

I tell them that if they will occupy themselves with the study of mathematics they will find in it t...

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

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

We are the bourgeoisie—the third estate, as they call us now—and what we want is a nobility of merit...

Habituation is a falling asleep or fatiguing of the sense of time which explains why young years pa...

The sweet spot is where duty and delight converge.

Everything is politics.

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

It is a strange fact that freedom and equality, the two basic ideas of democracy, are to some extent...

The books and magazines streamed in. He could buy them all, they piled up around him and even while ...

Perfectionism, of course, was something which even as a young man he had come to see as the innermos...

There is only one real misfortune: to forfeit one's own good opinion of oneself. Lose your complacen...

But the boredom of Frau Spatz had by now reached that pitch where it distorts the countenance of man...

Kindly permit me to tell you, sir, that I hate you. I hate you and your child, as I hate the life of...

What they, in their innocence, cannot comprehend is that a properly constituted, healthy, decent man...

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

Who then was the orthodox, who the freethinker? Where lay the true position, the true state of man? ...

Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.

Naphta loathed the bourgeois state and its love of security. He found occasion to express this loath...

Space, like time, engenders forgetfulness; but it does so by setting us bodily free from our surroun...

A harmful truth is better than a useful lie.

Consciousness of self was an inherent function of matter once it was organized as life, and if that ...

And life? Life itself? Was it perhaps only an infection, a sickening of matter? Was that which one m...

Laughter is a sunbeam of the soul.

I know I am talking nonsense, but I’d rather go rambling on, and partly expressing something I find ...

The diaries of opium-eaters record how, during the brief period of ecstasy, the drugged person's dre...

Travelers prove their lack of education if they make fun of the customs and values of their hosts, a...

Is not the pastness of the past the more profound, the more legendary, the more immediately it falls...

One could say that someone who does nothing but wait is like a glutton whose digestive system proces...

For the sake of goodness and love, man shall grant death no dominion over his thoughts.

Passionate—that means to live for the sake of living. But one knows that you all live for sake of ex...

No, not of course at all—it is really all hocus-pocus. The days lengthen in the winter-time, and whe...

Disease was a perverse, a dissolute form of life. And life? Life itself? Was it perhaps only an infe...

[Men] act in response to an outward situation, and on being presented with an opportunity to conform...

At thirty a man steps out of the darkness and wasteland of preparation into active life it is the ti...

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

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

To be young means to be original, to have remained nearer to the sources of life: it means to be abl...

For a brief moment I felt I was the older, the more mature."A gift of life," I responded, "if not to...

Nature in her creative dreaming, dreamt the same thing both here and there, and if one spoke of imit...

This old, folkish layer survives in us all, and to speak as I really think, I do not consider religi...

A solitary, unused to speaking of what he sees and feels, has mental experiences which are at once m...

Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perve...

Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also,...

It is love not reason that is stronger than death.

Cases of typhoid take the following course:When the fever is at its height, life calls out to the pa...

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

Hidden away amongst Aschenbach’s writing was a passage directly asserting that nearly all the great ...

What the collective age wants allows and approves is the perpetual holiday from the self.

Human reason needs only to will more strongly than fate and she is fate.

Speech is civilization itself.

The Ladies Buddenbrook from Breite Strasse did not weep, however - it was not their custom. Their fa...

They walked, and the long waves rolled and murmured rhythmically beside them; the fresh salty wind b...

I bear within me the seed, the rudiments, the possibility of life's capacities and endeavors. Where ...

His games have a deeper meaning and fascination that adults can no longer fathom and require nothing...

He completely lacked any ardent interest that might have occupied his mind. His interior life was im...

He loved the sea for deep-seated reasons: the hardworking artist's need for repose, the desire to ta...