Thomas Mann Quotes

A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth.

He probably was mediocre after all, though in a very honorable sense of that word.

Forbearance in the face of fate, beauty constant under torture, are not merely passive. They are a positive achievement, an explicit triumph.

A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

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.

A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.

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.

A harmful truth is better than a useful lie.

What our age needs, what it demands, what it will create for itself, is—terror.

Art is the funnel, as it were, through which spirit is poured into life.