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Stupid – well, there are so many kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst.

Thomas Mann

One must die to life in order to be utterly a creator.
THOMAS MANN

Creation Death Life Oneself
Animals do not admire each other. A horse does not admire its companion.
THOMAS MANN

Admire Animal Companion
Every reasonable human being should be a moderate Socialist.
THOMAS MANN

Human Reason Social
Forbearance in the face of fate, beauty constant under torture, are not merely passive. They are a positive achievement, an explicit triumph.
THOMAS MANN

Achievement Beautiful Face Fate Positive Win
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
Thought that can merge wholly into feeling, feeling that can merge wholly into thought – these are the artist’s highest joy.
THOMAS MANN

Artist Feeling High Joy Thinking
No man remains quite what he was when he recognizes himself.
THOMAS MANN

Himself Man Quite Recognition
People’s behavior makes sense if you think about it in terms of their goals, needs, and motives.
THOMAS MANN

Goal Motive Need People Yourself
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 MANN

Conscious Life Himself Live Man Personal
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
Art is the funnel, as it were, through which spirit is poured into life.
THOMAS MANN

Art Life Pour Spirit
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

Best Lust Mathematics Occupation Remedy Study
A man’s dying is more the survivors’ affair than his own.
THOMAS MANN

Affair Death Himself Man Survive
Time cools, time clarifies; no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours.
THOMAS MANN

Maintain Quite Time
What our age needs, what it demands, what it will create for itself, is—terror.
THOMAS MANN

Age Creation Demand Terror
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
Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportianate, the absurd and the forbidden.
THOMAS MANN

Astonish Beautiful Original Poetry Solitude Weird
All interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life.
THOMAS MANN

Death Expression Interest Life
I don’t think anyone is thinking long-term now.
THOMAS MANN

Goal Present Thinking
But 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.
THOMAS MANN

Belong Bright Charm Children Deep Love Myself Ordinary Secret
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.
THOMAS MANN

Acceptance Artist Injustice Nature Privilege
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

Author Book Enough Genius Greatness Happiness Strange
Technology and comfort – having those, people speak of culture, but do not have it.
THOMAS MANN

Culture People Talk Technology
For to be poised against fatality, to meet adverse conditions gracefully, is more than simple endurance; it is an act of aggression, a positive triumph.
THOMAS MANN

Act Adversity Fatal Grace Poised Positive
A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
THOMAS MANN

Difficult People Writing
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
If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it.
THOMAS MANN

Expression Ideas Possession Smell Yourself

Stupid – well, there are so many kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst.

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Stupid – well, there are so many kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst.

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