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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

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.
THOMAS MANN

Demand Live Passion Problem Public Youth
We don’t love qualities, we love persons; sometimes by reason of their defects as well as of their qualities.
THOMAS MANN

Love Ourselves Person Quality Reason Time
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

Feeling Man Mental Talk
I don’t think anyone is thinking long-term now.
THOMAS MANN

Goal Present Thinking
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.
THOMAS MANN

Conscious Flow Foundation Life Reproduction Time
For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts.
THOMAS MANN

Death Goodness Himself Love Thinking
Thought that can merge wholly into feeling, feeling that can merge wholly into thought – these are the artist’s highest joy.
THOMAS MANN

Artist Feeling High Joy Thinking
Laughter is a sunbeam of the soul.
THOMAS MANN

Laughter Soul Sunshine
Technology and comfort – having those, people speak of culture, but do not have it.
THOMAS MANN

Culture People Talk Technology
Often I have thought of the day when I gazed for the first time at the sea. The sea is vast, the sea is wide, my eyes roved far and wide and longed to be free. But there was the horizon. Why a horizon, when I wanted the infinite from life?
THOMAS MANN

Infinite Life Sea Thinking Time
Only love, and not reason, yields kind thoughts.
THOMAS MANN

Kind Love Reason Thinking
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
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

Clever Health Ideas Man Perfection Refine Unusual
What our age needs, what it demands, what it will create for itself, is—terror.
THOMAS MANN

Age Creation Demand Terror
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

Deprive Himself Man Safety Smoke Touch Understand
I stand between two worlds. I am at home in neither, and I suffer in consequence. You artists call me a bourgeois, and the bourgeois try to arrest me…I don’t know which makes me feel worse.
THOMAS MANN

Arrest Feeling Home Stand Suffering World Worst

In books we never find anything but ourselves. Strangely enough, that always gives us great pleasure, and we say the author is a genius.

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In books we never find anything but ourselves. Strangely enough, that always gives us great pleasure, and we say the author is a genius.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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