Thomas Mann famous quotes

Order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject.
-- Thomas Mann

#Order #Simplicity #Firsts

Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.
-- Thomas Mann

#Evil #Tolerance #Politics

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

#Wisdom #New Year #Time

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

#Beauty #Opposites #Giving

It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.
-- Thomas Mann

#Love #Life #Marriage

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

#Peace #War #Hippie

Art is the funnel, as it were, through which spirit is poured into life.
-- Thomas Mann

#Art #Spirit #Art Is

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

#Home #Artist #Two

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

#Book #Giving #Genius

Laughter is a sunbeam of the soul.
-- Thomas Mann

#Laughter #Soul #Sunbeams

Time cools, time clarifies; no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours.
-- Thomas Mann

#Time #Hours #Mood

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

#Clever #Stupid #Men

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

#Men #Consciousness #Individual

Distance in a straight line has no mystery. The mystery is in the sphere.
-- Thomas Mann

#Distance #Spheres #Lines

No man remains quite what he was when he recognizes himself.
-- Thomas Mann

#Men #Political #Remains

A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth.
-- Thomas Mann

#Truth #Lying #Opposites

People's behavior makes sense if you think about it in terms of their goals, needs, and motives.
-- Thomas Mann

#Inspirational #Education #Thinking

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

#Stupidity #Different #Kind

He who loves the more is the inferior and must suffer.
-- Thomas Mann

#Suffering

Nothing is more curious and awkward than the relationship of two people who only know each other with their eyes — who meet and observe each other daily, even hourly and who keep up the impression of disinterest either because of morals or because of a mental abnormality. Between them there is listlessness and pent-up curiosity, the hysteria of an unsatisfied, unnaturally suppressed need for communion and also a kind of tense respect. Because man loves and honors man as long as he is not able to judge him, and desire is a product of lacking knowledge.
-- Thomas Mann

#Eye #Men #Two

Innate in nearly every artistic nature is a wanton, treacherous penchant for accepting injustice when it creates beauty and showing sympathy for and paying homage to aristocratic privilege.
-- Thomas Mann

#Privilege #Artistic #Injustice

This was love at first sight, love everlasting: a feeling unknown, unhoped for, unexpected--in so far as it could be a matter of conscious awareness; it took entire possession of him, and he understood, with joyous amazement, that this was for life.
-- Thomas Mann

#Love #Sight #Feelings

All interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life.
-- Thomas Mann

#Expression #Disease #Interest

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

#Men #Mouths #Safe

Thought that can merge wholly into feeling, feeling that can merge wholly into thought - these are the artist's highest joy.
-- Thomas Mann

#Artist #Joy #Feelings

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

#Positive #Simple #Endurance

A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
-- Thomas Mann

#Writing #People #Difficult

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

#Respect #Real #Self

Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportianate, the absurd and the forbidden.
-- Thomas Mann

#Solitude #Originality #Absurd

A harmful truth is better than a useful lie.
-- Thomas Mann

#Lying #Truth Is

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

#Eye #Jewels #Wonderful

Everything is politics.
-- Thomas Mann

#Reality

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

#Flow #Foundation #Timeless

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

#Dwelling #House #Humanity

And then the sly arch-lover that he was, he said the subtlest thing of all: that the lover was nearer the divine than the beloved; for the god was in the one but not in the other - perhaps the tenderest, most mocking thought that ever was thought, and source of all the guile and secret bliss the lover knows.
-- Thomas Mann

#Secret #Arches #Lovers

To allow only the kind of art that the average man understands is the worst small-mindedness and the murder of mind and spirit. It is my conviction that the intellect can be certain that in doing what most disconcerts the crowd, in pursuing the most daring, unconventional advances and explorations, it will in some highly indirect fashion serve man - and in the long run, all men.
-- Thomas Mann

#Running #Fashion #Art

If the years of youth are experienced slowly, while the later years of life hurtle past at an ever-increasing speed, it must be habit that causes it. We know full well that the insertion of new habits or the changing of old ones is the only way to preserve life, to renew our sense of time, to rejuvenate, intensify, and ***** our experience of time—and thereby renew our sense of life itself. That is the reason for every change of scenery and air..
-- Thomas Mann

#Past #Years #Air

The observations and encounters of a solitary, taciturn man are vaguer and at the same times more intense than those of a sociable man; his thoughts are deeper, odder and never without a touch of sadness. Images and perceptions that could be dismissed with a glance, a laugh, an exchange of opinions, occupy him unduly, become more intense in the silence, become significant, become an experience, an adventure, an emotion. Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportionate, the absurd and the forbidden.
-- Thomas Mann

#Adventure #Sadness #Men

He took in the squeaky music, the vulgar and pining melodies, because passion immobilizes good taste and seriously considers what soberly would be thought of as funny and to be resented.
-- Thomas Mann

#Passion #Taste #Would Be

It is remarkable how a man cannot summarize his thoughts in even the most general sort of way without betraying himself completely, without putting his whole self into it, quite unawares, presenting as if in allegory the basic themes and problems of his life.
-- Thomas Mann

#Men #Self #Way

What good would politics be, if it didn’t give everyone the opportunity to make moral compromises.
-- Thomas Mann

#Opportunity #Giving #Moral

Technology and comfort - having those, people speak of culture, but do not have it.
-- Thomas Mann

#Technology #People #Culture

…What our age needs, what it demands, what it will create for itself, is—terror.
-- Thomas Mann

#Age #Demand #Needs

Only love, and not reason, yields kind thoughts.
-- Thomas Mann

#Yield #Kind #Reason

Isn't it grand, isn't it good, that language has only one word for everything we associate with love - from utter sanctity to the most fleshly lust? The result is perfect clarity in ambiguity, for love cannot be disembodied even in its most sanctified forms, nor is it without sanctity even at its most fleshly. Love is always simply itself, both as a subtle affirmation of life and as the highest passion; love is our sympathy with organic life.
-- Thomas Mann

#Love #Passion #Perfect

The observations and encounters of a devotee of solitude and silence are at once less distinct and more penetrating than those of the sociable man; his thoughts are weightier, stranger, and never without a tinge of sadness. Images and perceptions which might otherwise be easily dispelled by a glance, a laugh, an exchange of comments, concern him unduly, they sink into mute depths, take on significance, become experiences, adventures, emotions.
-- Thomas Mann

#Adventure #Sadness #Men

Even in a personal sense, after all, art is an intensified life. By art one is more deeply satisfied and more rapidly used up. It engraves on the countenance of its servant the traces of imaginary and intellectual adventures, and even if he has outwardly existed in cloistral tranquility, it leads in the long term to overfastidiousness, over-refinement, nervous fatigue and overstimulation, such as can seldom result from a life of the most extravagant passions and pleasures.
-- Thomas Mann

#Art #Adventure #Passion

There were profound reasons for his attachment to the sea: he loved it because as a hardworking artist he needed rest, needed to escape from the demanding complexity of phenomena and lie hidden on the bosom of the simple and tremendous; because of a forbidden longing deep within him that ran quite contrary to his life's task and was for that very reason seductive, a longing for the unarticulated and immeasurable, for eternity, for nothingness. To rest in the arms of perfection is the desire of any man intent upon creating excellence; and is not nothingness a form of perfection?
-- Thomas Mann

#Lying #Artist #Simple

A lonely, quiet person has observations and experiences that are at once both more indistinct and more penetrating than those of one more gregarious; his thoughts are weightier, stranger, and never without a tinge of sadness. . . . Loneliness fosters that which is original, daringly and bewilderingly beautiful, poetic. But loneliness also fosters that which is perverse, incongruous, absurd, forbidden.
-- Thomas Mann

#Beautiful #Lonely #Loneliness

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

#Eye #Sea #Firsts

Is not life in itself a thing of goodness, irrespective of whether the course it takes for us can be called a 'happy' one?
-- Thomas Mann

#Goodness

(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

#Girl #Book #Home

Nothing is stranger or more ticklish than a relationship between people who know each other only by sight, who meet and observe each other daily - no hourly - and are nevertheless compelled to keep up the pose of an indifferent stranger, neither greeting nor addressing each other, whether out of etiquette or their own whim.
-- Thomas Mann

#Sight #People #Ticklish

He probably was mediocre after all, though in a very honorable sense of that word.
-- Thomas Mann

#Mediocrity #Mediocre #Honorable

Reduced to a miserable mass level, the level of a Hitler, German Romanticism broke out into hysterical barbarism.
-- Thomas Mann

#Levels #Miserable #Hysterical

Has the world ever been changed by anything save the thought and its magic vehicle the Word?
-- Thomas Mann

#Magic #World #Changed

I shall need to sleep three weeks on end to get rested from the rest I've had.
-- Thomas Mann

#Sleep #Three #Needs

For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts.
-- Thomas Mann

#Love #Death #Men

One must die to life in order to be utterly a creator.
-- Thomas Mann

#Order #Creator

Speech is civilization itself.
-- Thomas Mann

#Civilization #Speech

A man's dying is more his survivor's affair than his own.
-- Thomas Mann

#Love #Death #Men

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

#Men #Talking #Intense

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

#Children #Blue #Secret Love

Every reasonable human being should be a moderate Socialist.
-- Thomas Mann

#Should #Socialist #Humans

Animals do not admire each other. A horse does not admire its companion.
-- Thomas Mann

#Horse #Animal #Doe

If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it.
-- Thomas Mann

#Ideas #Smell #Power Of Ideas

I don't think anyone is thinking long-term now.
-- Thomas Mann

#Thinking #Long #Term

Forbearance in the face of fate, beauty constant under torture, are not merely passive. They are a positive achievement, an explicit triumph.
-- Thomas Mann

#Fate #Achievement #Faces

We do not fear being called meticulous, inclining as we do to the view that only the exhaustive can be truly interesting.
-- Thomas Mann

#Views #Interesting #Meticulous

He thought what a fine thing it was that people made music all over the world, even in the strangest settings – probably even on polar expeditions.
-- Thomas Mann

#People #World #Made

The books and magazines streamed in. He could buy them all, they piled up around him and even while he read, the number of those still to be read disturbed him. … they stood in rows, weighing down his life like a possession which he did not succeed in subordinating to his personality.
-- Thomas Mann

#Book #Numbers #Personality

The accouterments of life were so rich and varied, so elaborated, that almost no place at all was left for life itself. Each and every accessory was so costly and beautiful that it had an existence above and beyond the purpose it was meant to serve – confusing the observer and absorbing attention.
-- Thomas Mann

#Beautiful #Confusing #Attention

Yes, they are carnal, both of them, love and death, and therein lies their terror and their great magic!
-- Thomas Mann

#Lying #Magic #Love And Death

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

#Passionate #Demand #Vivid

What we call National-Socialism is the poisonous perversion of ideas which have a long history in German intellectual life.
-- Thomas Mann

#Ideas #Eugenics #Long

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

#Math #Lust #Flesh

It is most certainly a good thing that the world knows only the beautiful opus but not its origins, not the conditions of its creation; for if people knew the sources of the artist's inspiration, that knowledge would often confuse them, alarm them, and thereby destroy the effects of excellence. strange hours! strangely enervating labor! bizarrely fertile intercourse of the mind with a body!
-- Thomas Mann

#Beautiful #Inspiration #Artist

We don't love qualities, we love persons; sometimes by reason of their defects as well as of their qualities.
-- Thomas Mann

#Love #Life #Funny Marriage