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.
THOMAS MANNBut my deepest and most secret love belongs to the fair-haired and the blue-eyed, the bright children of life, the happy, the charming and the ordinary.
More Thomas Mann Quotes
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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?
THOMAS MANN -
One has the idea of a stupid man as perfectly healthy and ordinary, and of illness as making one refined and clever and unusual.
THOMAS MANN -
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 -
Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportianate, the absurd and the forbidden.
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 -
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 -
I shall need to sleep three weeks on end to get rested from the rest I’ve had.
THOMAS MANN -
Distance in a straight line has no mystery. The mystery is in the sphere.
THOMAS MANN -
Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.
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 -
All interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life.
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Every reasonable human being should be a moderate Socialist.
THOMAS MANN -
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.
THOMAS MANN -
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.
THOMAS MANN -
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