Thomas Mann
War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.Collection: Peace
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.Collection: Society
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.Collection: Beauty
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.Collection: Beauty
It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.Collection: Love
Opinions cannot survive if one has no chance to fight for them.Collection: Chance
A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth.Collection: Great
A harmful truth is better than a useful lie.Collection: Truth
The only religious way to think of death is as part and parcel of life.Collection: Death
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.Collection: Positive
Everything is politics.Collection: Politics
All interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life.Collection: Death
For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts.Collection: Death
A man's dying is more his survivor's affair than his own.
Order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject.
Time cools, time clarifies; no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours.
A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
He who loves the more is the inferior and must suffer.
People's behavior makes sense if you think about it in terms of their goals, needs, and motives.
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.
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 the beautiful word begets the beautiful deed.
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.
Literature... is the union of suffering with the instinct for form.
Disease makes men more physical, it leaves them nothing but body.
Respectable means rich, and decent means poor. I should die if I heard my family called decent.
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.
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!
If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it.
It could become much worse.
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.
Culture and possessions, there is the bourgeoisie for you.
Psycho-analyses, how disgusting.
The writer's joy is the thought that can become emotion, the emotion that can wholly become a thought.
What is uttered is finished and done with.
Reduced to a miserable mass level, the level of a Hitler, German Romanticism broke out into hysterical barbarism.
Democracy is timelessly human, and timelessness always implies a certain amount of potential youthfulness.
A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.
Has the world ever been changed by anything save the thought and its magic vehicle the Word?
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.
Every reasonable human being should be a moderate Socialist.
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.
Human reason needs only to will more strongly than fate, and she is fate.
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.
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.
The task of a writer consists of being able to make something out of an idea.
I don't think anyone is thinking long-term now.
I shall need to sleep three weeks on end to get rested from the rest I've had.