Thomas Mann quotes - page 6

But he would "stay the course” - it was his favorite motto. (Thomas Mann)
The meeting in the open of two dogs, strangers to each other, is one of the most painful, thrilling, and pregnant of all conceivable encounters; it is surrounded by an atmosphere of the last canniness, presided over by a constraint for which I have no preciser name; they simply cannot pass each other, their mutual embarrassment is frightful to behold. View quote
Thomas Mann
Disease was a perverse, a dissolute form of life. View quote
Thomas Mann
To place Russian communism on the same moral level with Nazi fascism, because both are totalitarian, is, at best, superficial, in the worse case it is fascism. He who insists on this equality may be a democrat; in truth and in his heart, he is already a fascist, and will surely fight fascism with insincerity and appearance, but with complete hatred only communism. View quote
Thomas Mann
What we call mourning for our dead is perhaps not so much grief at not being able to call them back as it is grief at not being able to want to do so. View quote
Thomas Mann
Profundity must smile. View quote
Thomas Mann
If Goethe claimed towards the end of his life that every reasonable person is a moderate Liberal, then in our time one must say: Every reasonable person is a moderate Socialist. View quote
Thomas Mann
We don't love qualities, we love persons; sometimes by reason of their defects as well as of their qualities. View quote
Thomas Mann
Here and there, among a thousand other peddlers, are slyly hissing dealers who urge you to come along with them to allegedly "very beautiful" girls, and not only to girls. They keep at it, walk alongside, praising their wares until you answer roughly. They don't know that you have resolved to eat nothing but rice just to escape from sexuality! View quote
Thomas Mann
Hidden away amongst Aschenbach's writing was a passage directly asserting that nearly all the great things that exist owe their existence to a defiant despite: it is despite grief and anguish, despite poverty, loneliness, bodily weakness, vice and passion and a thousand inhibitions, that they have come into being at all. But this was more than an observation, it was an experience, it was positively the formula of his life and his fame, the key to his work. View quote
Thomas Mann
The only religious way to think of death is as part and parcel of life; to regard it, with the understanding and the emotions, as the the inviolable condition of life. (Thomas Mann)
Wagner's art is the most sensational self-portrayal and self-critique of German nature that it is possible to conceive. View quote
Thomas Mann
It is a strange fact that freedom and equality, the two basic ideas of democracy, are to some extent contradictory. View quote
Thomas Mann
We, when we sow the seeds of doubt deeper than the most up-to-date and modish free-thought has ever dreamed of doing, we well know what we are about. View quote
Thomas Mann
The same is true of the passive qualities, patience under suffering, even pleasure in ill usage. View quote
Thomas Mann
Passionate - that means to live for the sake of living. View quote
Thomas Mann
Irony, forsooth! Guard yourself, Engineer, from the sort of irony that thrives up here. View quote
Thomas Mann
It had been a moving, tranquil apotheosis, immersed in the transfiguring sunset glow of decline and decay and extinction. View quote
Thomas Mann
I am looking into an unborn and shapeless world that longs to be called to life and order, I am looking into a throng of phantoms of human forms which beckon me to conjure them and set them free: some of them tragic, some of them ridiculous, and some that are both at once - and to these I am very devoted. But my deepest and most secret love belongs to the blond and blue-eyed, the bright-spirited living ones, the happy, amiable, and commonplace. View quote
Thomas Mann
I know I am talking nonsense, but I'd rather go rambling on, and partly expressing something I find it difficult to express, than to keep on transmitting faultless platitudes. View quote
Thomas Mann
Writing well was almost the same as thinking well, and thinking well was the next thing to acting well. (Thomas Mann)
Life is not the means for the achievement of an esthetic ideal of perfection; on the contrary, the work is an ethical symbol of life. View quote
Thomas Mann
Hold every moment sacred. Give each clarity and meaning, each the weight of thine awareness, each its true and due fulfillment. View quote
Thomas Mann
Time, we say, is Lethe; but change of air is a similar draught, and, if it works less thoroughly, does so more quickly. View quote
Thomas Mann
Space, like time, engenders forgetfulness; but it does so by setting us bodily free from our surroundings and giving us back our primitive, unattached state. View quote
Thomas Mann