Quotes By Thomas Mann

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

It could become much worse.

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

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

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.

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

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

Respectable means rich, and decent means poor. I should die if I heard my family called decent.

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

Democracy is timelessly human, and timelessness always implies a certain amount of potential youthfulness.

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.

Everything is politics.

The only religious way to think of death is as part and parcel of life.

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

Speech is civilization itself.

The writer's joy is the thought that can become emotion, the emotion that can wholly become a thought.

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.

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.

What we call National-Socialism is the poisonous perversion of ideas which have a long history in German intellectual life.

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.

I love and reverence the Word, the bearer of the spirit, the tool and gleaming ploughshare of progress.

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.

It is a strange fact that freedom and equality, the two basic ideas of democracy, are to some extent contradictory. Logically considered, freedom and equality are mutually exclusive, just as society and the individual are mutually exclusive.