Thomas Mann's Quotes

An art whose medium is language will always show a high degree of critical creativeness, for speech is itself a critique of life: it names, it characterizes, it passes judgment, in that it creates.

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.

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.

The Freudian theory is one of the most important foundation stones for an edifice to be built by future generations, the dwelling of a freer and wiser humanity.

There is something suspicious about music, gentlemen. I insist that she is, by her nature, equivocal. I shall not be going too far in saying at once that she is politically suspect.

A harmful truth is better than a useful lie.

War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.

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.

A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

Time has no divisions to mark its passage, there is never a thunder-storm or blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year. Even when a new century begins it is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols.

People's behavior makes sense if you think about it in terms of their goals, needs, and motives.

Everything is politics.

We don't love qualities, we love persons; sometimes by reason of their defects as well as of their qualities.

Every reasonable human being should be a moderate Socialist.

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

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.

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.

A man's dying is more his survivor's affair than his own.

He who loves the more is the inferior and must suffer.

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

A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth.

For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts.

I shall need to sleep three weeks on end to get rested from the rest I've had.

A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.

Has the world ever been changed by anything save the thought and its magic vehicle the Word?

Order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject.

All interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life.

Animals do not admire each other. A horse does not admire its companion.

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

Literature... is the union of suffering with the instinct for form.