Quotes By Thomas Mann

Speech is civilization itself.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

It could become much worse.

Culture and possessions, there is the bourgeoisie for you.

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!

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.