Quotes By Thomas Mann

Opinions cannot survive if one has no chance to fight for them.

The task of a writer consists of being able to make something out of an idea.

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.

What is uttered is finished and done with.

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.

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.

For I must tell you that we artists cannot tread the path of Beauty without Eros keeping company with us and appointing himself as our guide.

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

Speech is civilization itself.

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

Disease makes men more physical, it leaves them nothing but body.

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.

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.

One has the idea of a stupid man as perfectly healthy and ordinary, and of illness as making one refined and clever and unusual.

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.

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

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

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

Only he who desires is amiable and not he who is satiated.

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

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.

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.

It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.

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

Human reason needs only to will more strongly than fate, and she is fate.

It could become much worse.

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!

Culture and possessions, there is the bourgeoisie for you.

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

One always has the idea of a stupid man as perfectly healthy and ordinary, and of illness as making one refined and clever and unusual.