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.
THOMAS MANNWhat good would politics be, if it didn’t give everyone the opportunity to make moral compromises.
More Thomas Mann Quotes
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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?
THOMAS MANN -
Distance in a straight line has no mystery. The mystery is in the sphere.
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Animals do not admire each other. A horse does not admire its companion.
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Has the world ever been changed by anything save the thought and its magic vehicle the Word?
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Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.
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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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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 -
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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For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts.
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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.
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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.
THOMAS MANN -
All interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life.
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He probably was mediocre after all, though in a very honorable sense of that word.
THOMAS MANN -
We don’t love qualities, we love persons; sometimes by reason of their defects as well as of their qualities.
THOMAS MANN -
He took in the squeaky music, the vulgar and pining melodies, because passion immobilizes good taste and seriously considers what soberly would be thought of as funny and to be resented.
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Yes, they are carnal, both of them, love and death, and therein lies their terror and their great magic!
THOMAS MANN -
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.
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What good would politics be, if it didn’t give everyone the opportunity to make moral compromises.
THOMAS MANN -
Speech is civilization itself.
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Time cools, time clarifies; no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours.
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Stupid – well, there are so many kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst.
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One must die to life in order to be utterly a creator.
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We do not fear being called meticulous, inclining as we do to the view that only the exhaustive can be truly interesting.
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A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
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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 -
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