Thomas Mann quotes

Thomas Mann was a German novelist and essayist, recognized for his profound explorations of modern European society. His works, including "Buddenbrooks" and "The Magic Mountain," earned him international acclaim and the Nobel Prize in Literature. He became one of the most influential literary figures of the twentieth century. Here are 178 of his quotes:

War is a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.

Thomas Mann

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

Thomas Mann

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

Thomas Mann

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

Thomas Mann

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

A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth.

Thomas Mann

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

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.

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.

Thomas Mann

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

Thomas Mann

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

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

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!

Thomas Mann

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

Thomas Mann

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

Thomas Mann

Everything is politics.

Thomas Mann

Order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject - the actual enemy is the unknown.

Thomas Mann

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

Thomas Mann

Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.

Thomas Mann

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

Thomas Mann

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

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