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A harmful truth is better than a useful lie.

Thomas Mann

He took in the squeaky music, the vulgar and pining melodies, because passion immobilizes good taste and seriously considers what soberly would be thought of as funny and to be resented.
THOMAS MANN

Funny Music Passion Serious Vulgar
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.
THOMAS MANN

Beautiful Born Original Pervert Poetry
What we call National-Socialism is the poisonous perversion of ideas which have a long history in German intellectual life.
THOMAS MANN

History Ideas Intellect Life Poison
I tell them that if they will occupy themselves with the study of mathematics they will find in it the best remedy against the lusts of the flesh.
THOMAS MANN

Best Lust Mathematics Occupation Remedy Study
Innate in nearly every artistic nature is a wanton, treacherous penchant for accepting injustice when it creates beauty and showing sympathy for and paying homage to aristocratic privilege.
THOMAS MANN

Acceptance Artist Injustice Nature Privilege
Art is the funnel, as it were, through which spirit is poured into life.
THOMAS MANN

Art Life Pour Spirit
War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.
THOMAS MANN

Coward Escape Peace Problem War
Time cools, time clarifies; no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours.
THOMAS MANN

Maintain Quite Time
Has the world ever been changed by anything save the thought and its magic vehicle the Word?
THOMAS MANN

Change Magic Thinking Vehicle Word
What good would politics be, if it didn’t give everyone the opportunity to make moral compromises.
THOMAS MANN

Compromises Goodness Moral Opportunity Politics
This was love at first sight, love everlasting: a feeling unknown, unhoped for, unexpected–in so far as it could be a matter of conscious awareness; it took entire possession of him, and he understood, with joyous amazement, that this was for life.
THOMAS MANN

Expectation Feeling Joy Life Love Possession Sight Understand Unknown
If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it.
THOMAS MANN

Expression Ideas Possession Smell Yourself
Laughter is a sunbeam of the soul.
THOMAS MANN

Laughter Soul Sunshine
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!
THOMAS MANN

Care Creature Eyes Human Phenomenon Structure Wonderful
Stupid – well, there are so many kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst.
THOMAS MANN

Clever Kind Smart Stupidity Worst
For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts.
THOMAS MANN

Death Goodness Himself Love Thinking

A harmful truth is better than a useful lie.

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A harmful truth is better than a useful lie.

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