Quotes By Thomas Mann

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

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.

Everything is politics.

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

The only religious way to think of death is as part and parcel of life.

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

The writer's joy is the thought that can become emotion, the emotion that can wholly become a thought.

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

For the beautiful word begets the beautiful deed.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

What is uttered is finished and done with.

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.

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.