Thomas Mann quotes - page 2

Laughter is a sunbeam of the soul. (Thomas Mann)
Every reasonable human being should be a moderate Socialist. View quote
Thomas Mann
For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts. View quote
Thomas Mann
A harmful truth is better than a useful lie. View quote
Thomas Mann
I love and reverence the Word, the bearer of the spirit, the tool and gleaming ploughshare of progress. View quote
Thomas Mann
There is something suspicious about music, gentlemen. I insist that she is, by her nature, equivocal. I shall not be going too far in saying at once that she is politically suspect. View quote
Thomas Mann
Only he who desires is amiable and not he who is satiated. View quote
Thomas Mann
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. View quote
Thomas Mann
Disease makes men more physical, it leaves them nothing but body. View quote
Thomas Mann
Human reason needs only to will more strongly than fate, and she is fate. View quote
Thomas Mann
Democracy is timelessly human, and timelessness always implies a certain amount of potential youthfulness. (Thomas Mann)
Opinions cannot survive if one has no chance to fight for them. View quote
Thomas Mann
Psycho-analyses - how disgusting. View quote
Thomas Mann
People's behavior makes sense if you think about it in terms of their goals, needs, and motives. View quote
Thomas Mann
The beautiful word begets the beautiful deed. View quote
Thomas Mann
The writer's joy is the thought that can become emotion, the emotion that can wholly become a thought. View quote
Thomas Mann
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. View quote
Thomas Mann
There were profound reasons for his attachment to the sea: he loved it because as a hard-working 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? View quote
Thomas Mann
I hold that we shall one day recognize in Freud's life-work the cornerstone for the building of a new anthropology and therewith of a new structure, to which many stones are being brought up today, which shall be the future dwelling of a wiser and freer humanity. View quote
Thomas Mann
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. View quote
Thomas Mann
I have always been an admirer. I regard the gift of admiration as indispensable if one is to amount to something; I don't know where I would be without it. (Thomas Mann)
I have read your book and its terrible documentation with deepest emotion. I cannot describe the mixed feeling of abhorrence and loathing which has filled my heart while perusing these records of human degradation and abominable cruelty.. . . To keep quiet would serve only the moral indifference of the world. . . You have done your duty in publishing this book and bringing these facts to light. View quote
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 quote
Thomas Mann
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. View quote
Thomas Mann
In books we never find anything but ourselves. Strangely enough, that always gives us great pleasure, and we say the author is a genius. View quote
Thomas Mann