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 MANNSolitude 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.
More Thomas Mann Quotes
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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.
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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.
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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.
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He probably was mediocre after all, though in a very honorable sense of that word.
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I don’t think anyone is thinking long-term now.
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People’s behavior makes sense if you think about it in terms of their goals, needs, and motives.
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Stupid – well, there are so many kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst.
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.
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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 -
Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportianate, the absurd and the forbidden.
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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.
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Art is the funnel, as it were, through which spirit is poured into life.
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Everything is politics.
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Speech is civilization itself.
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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