Thomas Mann Quotes

Everything is politics... view

By: Thomas Mann

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

By: Thomas Mann

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

By: Thomas Mann

It could become much worse... view

By: Thomas Mann

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... view

By: Thomas Mann

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... view

By: Thomas Mann

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

By: Thomas Mann

Literature... is the union of suffering with the instinct for form... view

By: Thomas Mann

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

By: Thomas Mann

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

By: Thomas Mann

For the myth is the foundation of life.. view

By: Thomas Mann

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

By: Thomas Mann

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... view

By: Thomas Mann

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

By: Thomas Mann

Every reasonable human being should be a moderate Socialist... view

By: Thomas Mann

Disease makes men more physical, it leaves them nothing but body... view

By: Thomas Mann

Democracy is timelessly human, and timelessness always implies a certain amount of potential youthfulness... view

By: Thomas Mann

Culture and possessions, there is the bourgeoisie for you... view

By: Thomas Mann

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... view

By: Thomas Mann

Animals do not admire each other. A horse does not admire its companion... view

By: Thomas Mann

I love and reverence the Word, the bearer of the spirit, the tool and gleaming ploughshare of progress... view

By: Thomas Mann

Has the world ever been changed by anything save the thought and its magic vehicle the Word?.. view

By: Thomas Mann

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

By: Thomas Mann

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... view

By: Thomas Mann

For the beautiful word begets the beautiful deed... view

By: Thomas Mann

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

By: Thomas Mann

One must die to life in order to be utterly a creator... view

By: Thomas Mann

Only he who desires is amiable and not he who is satiated... view

By: Thomas Mann

Order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject... view

By: Thomas Mann

Psycho-analyses, how disgusting... view

By: Thomas Mann

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

By: Thomas Mann

Respectable means rich, and decent means poor. I should die if I heard my family called decent... view

By: Thomas Mann

One has the idea of a stupid man as perfectly healthy and ordinary, and of illness as making one refined and clever and unusual... view

By: Thomas Mann

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

By: Thomas Mann

The only religious way to think of death is as part and parcel of life... view

By: Thomas Mann

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

By: Thomas Mann

What is uttered is finished and done with... view

By: Thomas Mann

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!.. view

By: Thomas Mann

We don't love qualities, we love persons.. view

By: Thomas Mann

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

By: Thomas Mann

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... view

By: Thomas Mann

Time cools, time clarifies.. view

By: Thomas Mann