black
grey
blue
red
brown
white

If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it.

Thomas Mann

Technology and comfort – having those, people speak of culture, but do not have it.
THOMAS MANN

Culture People Talk Technology
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
He probably was mediocre after all, though in a very honorable sense of that word.
THOMAS MANN

Average Honor Word
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 MANN

Expectation Feeling Joy Life Love Possession Sight Understand Unknown
He who loves the more is the inferior and must suffer.
THOMAS MANN

Himself Inferior Love Suffering
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

Care Creature Eyes Human Phenomenon Structure Wonderful
Animals do not admire each other. A horse does not admire its companion.
THOMAS MANN

Admire Animal Companion
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
Speech is civilization itself.
THOMAS MANN

Civilization One Liner Speech
What our age needs, what it demands, what it will create for itself, is—terror.
THOMAS MANN

Age Creation Demand Terror
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

Beautiful Born Original Pervert Poetry
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
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
Distance in a straight line has no mystery. The mystery is in the sphere.
THOMAS MANN

Deep Distance Mystery Shape
War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.
THOMAS MANN

Coward Escape Peace Problem War
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
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
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 shall need to sleep three weeks on end to get rested from the rest I’ve had.
THOMAS MANN

End Myself Need Sleep
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
What good would politics be, if it didn’t give everyone the opportunity to make moral compromises.
THOMAS MANN

Compromises Goodness Moral Opportunity Politics
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
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

Feeling Man Mental Talk
Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.
THOMAS MANN

Crime Evil One Liner Tolerance
If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it.
THOMAS MANN

Expression Ideas Possession Smell Yourself
Time cools, time clarifies; no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours.
THOMAS MANN

Maintain Quite Time
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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Thomas Mann Quotes