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 MANNHe probably was mediocre after all, though in a very honorable sense of that word.
More Thomas Mann Quotes
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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.
THOMAS MANN -
Time cools, time clarifies; no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours.
THOMAS MANN -
Laughter is a sunbeam of the soul.
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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 -
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!
THOMAS MANN -
What we call National-Socialism is the poisonous perversion of ideas which have a long history in German intellectual life.
THOMAS MANN -
A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth.
THOMAS MANN -
Everything is politics.
THOMAS MANN -
All interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life.
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 -
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 -
I shall need to sleep three weeks on end to get rested from the rest I’ve had.
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I don’t think anyone is thinking long-term now.
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War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.
THOMAS MANN -
What pleases the public is lively and vivid delineation which makes no demands on the intellect; but passionate and absolutist youth can only be enthralled by a problem.
THOMAS MANN