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 MANNWe don’t love qualities, we love persons; sometimes by reason of their defects as well as of their qualities.
More Thomas Mann Quotes
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A man’s dying is more the survivors’ affair than his own.
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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.
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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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Only love, and not reason, yields kind thoughts.
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Animals do not admire each other. A horse does not admire its companion.
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Every reasonable human being should be a moderate Socialist.
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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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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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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.
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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.
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Distance in a straight line has no mystery. The mystery is in the sphere.
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Stupid – well, there are so many kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst.
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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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Laughter is a sunbeam of the soul.
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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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People’s behavior makes sense if you think about it in terms of their goals, needs, and motives.
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What our age needs, what it demands, what it will create for itself, is—terror.
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A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
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Is not life in itself a thing of goodness, irrespective of whether the course it takes for us can be called a ‘happy’ one?
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A harmful truth is better than a useful lie.
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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.
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Art is the funnel, as it were, through which spirit is poured into life.
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We don’t love qualities, we love persons; sometimes by reason of their defects as well as of their qualities.
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He probably was mediocre after all, though in a very honorable sense of that word.
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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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Has the world ever been changed by anything save the thought and its magic vehicle the Word?
THOMAS MANN