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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

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

Funny Music Passion Serious Vulgar
A harmful truth is better than a useful lie.
THOMAS MANN

Better Harm Lying Truth
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.
THOMAS MANN

Conscious Flow Foundation Life Reproduction Time
What good would politics be, if it didn’t give everyone the opportunity to make moral compromises.
THOMAS MANN

Compromises Goodness Moral Opportunity Politics
Speech is civilization itself.
THOMAS MANN

Civilization One Liner Speech
Is not life in itself a thing of goodness, irrespective of whether the course it takes for us can be called a ‘happy’ one?
THOMAS MANN

Course Happiness Life Name Oneself
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

Demand Live Passion Problem Public Youth
It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.
THOMAS MANN

Faith Love Reason Strong
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

Expedition Music People Thinking World
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

Goodness Hesitate Misfortune Opinion Reality Yourself
We don’t love qualities, we love persons; sometimes by reason of their defects as well as of their qualities.
THOMAS MANN

Love Ourselves Person Quality Reason Time
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

Deprive Himself Man Safety Smoke Touch Understand
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

Arrest Feeling Home Stand Suffering World Worst
If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it.
THOMAS MANN

Expression Ideas Possession Smell Yourself
He probably was mediocre after all, though in a very honorable sense of that word.
THOMAS MANN

Average Honor Word
A man’s dying is more the survivors’ affair than his own.
THOMAS MANN

Affair Death Himself Man Survive

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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In books we never find anything but ourselves. Strangely enough, that always gives us great pleasure, and we say the author is a genius.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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