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 MANNIf you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it.
More Thomas Mann Quotes
-
-
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 -
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 -
Animals do not admire each other. A horse does not admire its companion.
THOMAS MANN -
Stupid – well, there are so many kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst.
THOMAS MANN -
Every reasonable human being should be a moderate Socialist.
THOMAS MANN -
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.
THOMAS MANN -
It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.
THOMAS MANN -
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 -
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.
THOMAS MANN -
What our age needs, what it demands, what it will create for itself, is—terror.
THOMAS MANN -
A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
THOMAS MANN -
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 -
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 -
A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.
THOMAS MANN -
Everything is politics.
THOMAS MANN -
He thought what a fine thing it was that people made music all over the world, even in the strangest settings – probably even on polar expeditions.
THOMAS MANN -
Is not life in itself a thing of goodness, irrespective of whether the course it takes for us can be called a ‘happy’ one?
THOMAS MANN -
Forbearance in the face of fate, beauty constant under torture, are not merely passive. They are a positive achievement, an explicit triumph.
THOMAS MANN -
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 -
The Freudian theory is one of the most important foundation stones for an edifice to be built by future generations, the dwelling of a freer and wiser humanity.
THOMAS MANN -
A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth.
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 -
I shall need to sleep three weeks on end to get rested from the rest I’ve had.
THOMAS MANN -
What we call National-Socialism is the poisonous perversion of ideas which have a long history in German intellectual life.
THOMAS MANN -
Laughter is a sunbeam of the soul.
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.
THOMAS MANN