Thomas Mann Quotations

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

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

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

Every reasonable human being should be a moderate Socialist.

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

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.

A harmful truth is better than a useful lie.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

For the beautiful word begets the beautiful deed.

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

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

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

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.

A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.

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

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.

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

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

Culture and possessions, there is the bourgeoisie for you.

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

What is uttered is finished and done with.

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.

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

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!

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The task of a writer consists of being able to make something out of an idea.

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.

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.

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

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

Separation would likely do more harm than good for congressional Republicans. They need to try to rehabilitate the president's political standing, which will have a large bearing on the size of their seat loss in 2006.

I would say Joe Lieberman (would be perceived as being the most pro-business), ... is the least likely of the major candidates to win the nomination.

Bush's partisan style of governance has reinforced it.

If those train wrecks and if that gamesmanship is being driven by broad political forces, narrow margins in the House and the Senate, divided party government, difficult decisions that have to be made, genuine differences that exist, mobilization of interest groups if all of those things are true, you are going to find vehicles to have those fights, whether you have a two-year budget cycle or not.

It adds to the woes of the president and the Republican Party in the midterm elections.

Republicans who had doubts about elements of the president's tax and spending programs were willing to play ball in the interests of advancing the Republican cause. Now that the president is in serious political trouble, they're more inclined to make some independent judgments.

I think was Harry Truman who said, 'If you want to live like a Republican, vote Democratic,' ... The idea that somehow a Democratic majority is harmful for the economy strikes me as fanciful. It's financial fiction.

Whether this has any long-term impact depends on whether a party or presidential candidate seizes the opportunity to elevate political reform as a campaign and governing issue.

Do you know how many times campaign-finance reform failed before final passage in 2002? Many times.

Third, the overall support for the President does not extend to specific dimensions of his job performance beyond national security.

In states without a provision for popular initiative, reformers must navigate the normal state legislative process to alter the redistricting process.

Apart from the presidential contest, Republicans have an advantage in the Senate because they are defending fewer seats in more hospitable territory.

His background, record and silence on a number of questions spoke volumes about his likely performance on the court.

It was not quite the finale that the president and the Republican leadership had in mind.

The man is amazing. He is obviously strong and hardy and able and intelligent.

This president, in particular, tends to be very much opposed to members of his administration being forced out of office by others. In his view, it amounts to a sign of culpability on the president's part.

They feel emboldened in a way that they weren't after 9-11. They see that their criticisms help shape public opinion and they are emboldened by seeing erosion in the Republican Party unity.

This is the ugliest period in our politics in many decades, ... tribalism.

Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.

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 retard our experience of time—and thereby renew our sense of life itself. That is the reason for every change of scenery and air..

Laughter is a sunbeam of the soul.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

In books we never find anything but ourselves. Strangely enough, that always gives us great pleasure, and we say the author is a genius.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

No man remains quite what he was when he recognizes himself.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

Everything is politics.

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.

Only love, and not reason, yields kind thoughts.

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.

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?

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

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!

Speech is civilization itself.