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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.

Thomas Mann

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

Maintain Quite Time
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

Clever Health Ideas Man Perfection Refine Unusual
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
Has the world ever been changed by anything save the thought and its magic vehicle the Word?
THOMAS MANN

Change Magic Thinking Vehicle Word
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
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
Speech is civilization itself.
THOMAS MANN

Civilization One Liner Speech
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
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
Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.
THOMAS MANN

Crime Evil One Liner Tolerance
I don’t think anyone is thinking long-term now.
THOMAS MANN

Goal Present Thinking
Every reasonable human being should be a moderate Socialist.
THOMAS MANN

Human Reason Social
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
If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it.
THOMAS MANN

Expression Ideas Possession Smell Yourself
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

Infinite Life Sea Thinking Time
All interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life.
THOMAS MANN

Death Expression Interest Life
What good would politics be, if it didn’t give everyone the opportunity to make moral compromises.
THOMAS MANN

Compromises Goodness Moral Opportunity Politics
What our age needs, what it demands, what it will create for itself, is—terror.
THOMAS MANN

Age Creation Demand Terror
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
He who loves the more is the inferior and must suffer.
THOMAS MANN

Himself Inferior Love Suffering
Yes, they are carnal, both of them, love and death, and therein lies their terror and their great magic!
THOMAS MANN

Death Greatness Love Magic
Everything is politics.
THOMAS MANN

One Liner Politics
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

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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