Quotes By Thomas Mann

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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!

Culture and possessions, there is the bourgeoisie for you.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Every reasonable human being should be a moderate Socialist.

Psycho-analyses, how disgusting.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

For the beautiful word begets the beautiful deed.

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

A harmful truth is better than a useful lie.

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