Quotes By Thomas Mann

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Culture and possessions, there is the bourgeoisie for you.

All interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in 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!

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.

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

Every reasonable human being should be a moderate Socialist.

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.

Psycho-analyses, how disgusting.

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.

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

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

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