Quotes By Thomas Mann

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.

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

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

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

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

Every reasonable human being should be a moderate Socialist.

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

Psycho-analyses, how disgusting.

Everything is politics.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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