People’s behavior makes sense if you think about it in terms of their goals, needs, and motives.
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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Only love, and not reason, yields kind thoughts.
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He probably was mediocre after all, though in a very honorable sense of that word.
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War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.
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A harmful truth is better than a useful lie.
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Stupid – well, there are so many kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst.
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Animals do not admire each other. A horse does not admire its companion.
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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.
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A man’s dying is more the survivors’ affair than his own.
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Has the world ever been changed by anything save the thought and its magic vehicle the Word?
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Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportianate, the absurd and the forbidden.
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Laughter is a sunbeam of the soul.
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Everything is politics.
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Yes, they are carnal, both of them, love and death, and therein lies their terror and their great magic!
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One has the idea of a stupid man as perfectly healthy and ordinary, and of illness as making one refined and clever and unusual.
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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.
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Distance in a straight line has no mystery. The mystery is in the sphere.
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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.
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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.
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What a wonderful phenomenon it is, carefully considered, when the human eye, that jewel of organic structures, concentrates its moist brilliance on another human creature!
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What our age needs, what it demands, what it will create for itself, is—terror.
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Time cools, time clarifies; no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours.
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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?
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For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts.
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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.
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A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
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Art is the funnel, as it were, through which spirit is poured into life.
THOMAS MANN