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

Thomas Mann

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

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

Expression Ideas Possession Smell Yourself
I shall need to sleep three weeks on end to get rested from the rest I’ve had.
THOMAS MANN

End Myself Need Sleep
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
Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.
THOMAS MANN

Crime Evil One Liner Tolerance
Order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject.
THOMAS MANN

Order Simplify Subject
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
Art is the funnel, as it were, through which spirit is poured into life.
THOMAS MANN

Art Life Pour Spirit
We do not fear being called meticulous, inclining as we do to the view that only the exhaustive can be truly interesting.
THOMAS MANN

Fear Interest Ourselves Sight View
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
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
A harmful truth is better than a useful lie.
THOMAS MANN

Better Harm Lying Truth
What our age needs, what it demands, what it will create for itself, is—terror.
THOMAS MANN

Age Creation Demand Terror
Distance in a straight line has no mystery. The mystery is in the sphere.
THOMAS MANN

Deep Distance Mystery Shape
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 writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
THOMAS MANN

Difficult People Writing
Only love, and not reason, yields kind thoughts.
THOMAS MANN

Kind Love Reason Thinking
Everything is politics.
THOMAS MANN

One Liner Politics
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
War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.
THOMAS MANN

Coward Escape Peace Problem War
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
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 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
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
Stupid – well, there are so many kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst.
THOMAS MANN

Clever Kind Smart Stupidity Worst

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

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

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