Yes, they are carnal, both of them, love and death, and therein lies their terror and their great magic!
THOMAS MANNFor to be poised against fatality, to meet adverse conditions gracefully, is more than simple endurance; it is an act of aggression, a positive triumph.
More Thomas Mann Quotes
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Stupid – well, there are so many kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst.
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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.
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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.
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War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.
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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.
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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?
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Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportianate, the absurd and the forbidden.
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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.
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Art is the funnel, as it were, through which spirit is poured into life.
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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 -
Thought that can merge wholly into feeling, feeling that can merge wholly into thought – these are the artist’s highest joy.
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Time cools, time clarifies; no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours.
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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.
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We don’t love qualities, we love persons; sometimes by reason of their defects as well as of their qualities.
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Order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject.
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A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
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A man’s dying is more the survivors’ affair than his own.
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Forbearance in the face of fate, beauty constant under torture, are not merely passive. They are a positive achievement, an explicit triumph.
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What we call National-Socialism is the poisonous perversion of ideas which have a long history in German intellectual life.
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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.
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For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts.
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Speech is civilization itself.
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Everything is politics.
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People’s behavior makes sense if you think about it in terms of their goals, needs, and motives.
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Every reasonable human being should be a moderate Socialist.
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Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.
THOMAS MANN