We’ve sourced some of the most interesting and thought-provoking Thomas Mann Quotes. Each of the following quotes is overflowing with creativity, and knowledge.
Only he who desires is amiable and not he who is satiated.
Human reason needs only to will more strongly than fate, and she is fate.
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.
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!
Psycho-analyses, how disgusting.
Time cools, time clarifies; no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours.
What is uttered is finished and done with.
He who loves the more is the inferior and must suffer.
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.
Order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject.
It could become much worse.
War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of 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.
Every reasonable human being should be a moderate Socialist.
Reduced to a miserable mass level, the level of a Hitler, German Romanticism broke out into hysterical barbarism.
It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.
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.
Democracy is timelessly human, and timelessness always implies a certain amount of potential youthfulness.
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 only religious way to think of death is as part and parcel of life.
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.
Disease makes men more physical, it leaves them nothing but body.
I shall need to sleep three weeks on end to get rested from the rest I’ve had.
A man’s dying is more his survivor’s affair than his own.
A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth.
Has the world ever been changed by anything save the thought and its magic vehicle the Word?
What we call National-Socialism is the poisonous perversion of ideas which have a long history in German intellectual life.
Animals do not admire each other. A horse does not admire its companion.
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.
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.
