A harmful truth is better than a useful lie.
THOMAS MANNSolitude 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.
More Thomas Mann Quotes
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A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
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Animals do not admire each other. A horse does not admire its companion.
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He who loves the more is the inferior and must suffer.
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Yes, they are carnal, both of them, love and death, and therein lies their terror and their great magic!
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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.
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Every reasonable human being should be a moderate Socialist.
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Time cools, time clarifies; no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours.
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If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it.
THOMAS MANN -
All interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life.
THOMAS MANN -
In books we never find anything but ourselves. Strangely enough, that always gives us great pleasure, and we say the author is a genius.
THOMAS MANN -
He probably was mediocre after all, though in a very honorable sense of that word.
THOMAS MANN -
I shall need to sleep three weeks on end to get rested from the rest I’ve had.
THOMAS MANN -
Thought that can merge wholly into feeling, feeling that can merge wholly into thought – these are the artist’s highest joy.
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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.
THOMAS MANN -
What good would politics be, if it didn’t give everyone the opportunity to make moral compromises.
THOMAS MANN -
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.
THOMAS MANN -
People’s behavior makes sense if you think about it in terms of their goals, needs, and motives.
THOMAS MANN -
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.
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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!
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One must die to life in order to be utterly a creator.
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For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts.
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What pleases the public is lively and vivid delineation which makes no demands on the intellect; but passionate and absolutist youth can only be enthralled by a problem.
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Distance in a straight line has no mystery. The mystery is in the sphere.
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What our age needs, what it demands, what it will create for itself, is—terror.
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.
THOMAS MANN -
War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.
THOMAS MANN