Distance in a straight line has no mystery. The mystery is in the sphere.
THOMAS MANNFor 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.
More Thomas Mann Quotes
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What our age needs, what it demands, what it will create for itself, is—terror.
THOMAS MANN -
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 -
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 -
Stupid – well, there are so many kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst.
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Has the world ever been changed by anything save the thought and its magic vehicle the Word?
THOMAS MANN -
No man remains quite what he was when he recognizes himself.
THOMAS MANN -
One must die to life in order to be utterly a creator.
THOMAS MANN -
I shall need to sleep three weeks on end to get rested from the rest I’ve had.
THOMAS MANN -
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 -
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 -
There is only one real misfortune: to forfeit one’s own good opinion of oneself. Lose your complacency, once betray your own self-contempt and the world will unhesitatingly endorse it.
THOMAS MANN -
A man’s dying is more the survivors’ affair than his own.
THOMAS MANN -
For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts.
THOMAS MANN -
What good would politics be, if it didn’t give everyone the opportunity to make moral compromises.
THOMAS MANN -
We don’t love qualities, we love persons; sometimes by reason of their defects as well as of their qualities.
THOMAS MANN -
Speech is civilization itself.
THOMAS MANN -
All interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life.
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 -
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 -
Forbearance in the face of fate, beauty constant under torture, are not merely passive. They are a positive achievement, an explicit triumph.
THOMAS MANN -
Art is the funnel, as it were, through which spirit is poured into life.
THOMAS MANN -
Order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject.
THOMAS MANN -
A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth.
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Thought that can merge wholly into feeling, feeling that can merge wholly into thought – these are the artist’s highest joy.
THOMAS MANN -
A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
THOMAS MANN -
Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.
THOMAS MANN