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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

We do not fear being called meticulous, inclining as we do to the view that only the exhaustive can be truly interesting.
THOMAS MANN

Fear Interest Ourselves Sight View
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
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

Acceptance Artist Injustice Nature Privilege
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

Act Adversity Fatal Grace Poised Positive
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

Foundation Humanity Important Theory Wisdom
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

Author Book Enough Genius Greatness Happiness Strange
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

Beautiful Born Original Pervert Poetry
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
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

Goodness Hesitate Misfortune Opinion Reality Yourself
No man remains quite what he was when he recognizes himself.
THOMAS MANN

Himself Man Quite Recognition
A harmful truth is better than a useful lie.
THOMAS MANN

Better Harm Lying Truth
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
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
What good would politics be, if it didn’t give everyone the opportunity to make moral compromises.
THOMAS MANN

Compromises Goodness Moral Opportunity Politics
Forbearance in the face of fate, beauty constant under torture, are not merely passive. They are a positive achievement, an explicit triumph.
THOMAS MANN

Achievement Beautiful Face Fate Positive Win
What our age needs, what it demands, what it will create for itself, is—terror.
THOMAS MANN

Age Creation Demand Terror

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

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

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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