Thomas Mann Quotes

157 Sourced Quotes

Asia surrounds us — wherever one's glance rests, a Tartar physiognomy.

Thomas Mann
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.

Thomas Mann
Irony, forsooth! Guard yourself, Engineer, from the sort of irony that thrives up here; guard yourself altogether from taking on their mental attitude! Where irony is not a direct and classic device of oratory, not for a moment equivocal to a healthy mind, it makes for depravity, it becomes a drawback to civilization, an unclean traffic with the forces of reaction, vice and materialism.

Thomas Mann
Reduced to a miserable mass level, the level of a Hitler, German Romanticism broke out into hysterical barbarism.

Thomas Mann
There is at bottom only one problem in the world, and this is its name. How does one break through? How does one get into the open? How does one burst the cocoon and become a butterfly?

Thomas Mann
There were profound reasons for his attachment to the sea: he loved it because as a hard-working artist he needed rest, needed to escape from the demanding complexity of phenomena and lie hidden on the bosom of the simple and tremendous; because of a forbidden longing deep within him that ran quite contrary to his life's task and was for that very reason seductive, a longing for the unarticulated and immeasurable, for eternity, for nothingness. To rest in the arms of perfection is the desire of any man intent upon creating excellence; and is not nothingness a form of perfection?

Thomas Mann
The deep conviction... that nothing good for Germany or the world can come out of the present German regime, has made me avoid the country in whose spiritual tradition I am more deeply rooted than are those who for three years have been trying to find courage enough to declare before the world that I am not a German. And I feel to the bottom of my heart that I have done right in the eyes of my contemporaries and of posterity.

Thomas Mann
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.

Thomas Mann
I met the New Passion, then, as democracy, as political enlightenment and the humanitarianism of happiness. I understood its efforts to be toward the politicization of everything ethos; its aggressiveness and doctrinary intolerance consisted – I experienced them personally – in its denial and slander of every nonpolitical ethos. Mankind as humanitarian internationalism; reason and virtue as the radical republic; intellect as a thing between a Jacobin club and Freemasonry; art as social literature and maliciously seductive rhetoric in the service of social desirability ; here we have the New Passion in its purest political form as I saw it close up. I admit that this is a special, extremely romanticized form of it.

Thomas Mann
Space, like time, engenders forgetfulness; but it does so by setting us bodily free from our surroundings and giving us back our primitive, unattached state. Yes, it can even, in the twinkling of an eye, make something like a vagabond of the pedant and Philistine. Time, we say, is Lethe; but change of air is a similar draught, and, if it works less thoroughly, does so more quickly.

Thomas Mann
The purifying, healing influence of literature, the dissipating of passions by knowledge and the written word, literature as the path to understanding, forgiveness and love, the redeeming might of the word, the literary spirit as the noblest manifestation of the spirit of man, the writer as perfected type, as saint.

Thomas Mann
The intellect longs for the delights of the non-intellect, that which is alive and beautiful dans sa stupidité.

Thomas Mann
I, for one, have never in my life come across a perfectly healthy human being.

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

Thomas Mann
Beer, tobacco, and music, he went on. Behold the Fatherland.

Thomas Mann
There is only one real misfortune: to forfeit one's own good opinion of oneself. Lose your complacency, once betray your own self-contempt and the world will unhesitatingly endorse it.

Thomas Mann
Hans Castorp loved music from his heart; it worked upon him much the same way as did his breakfast porter, with deeply soothing, narcotic effect, tempting him to doze.

Thomas Mann
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
Paradox is the poisonous flower of quietism, the iridescent surface of the rotting mind, the greatest depravity of all.

Thomas Mann
It had been a moving, tranquil apotheosis, immersed in the transfiguring sunset glow of decline and decay and extinction. An old family, already grown too weary and too noble for life and action, had reached the end of its history, and its last utterances were sounds of music: a few violin notes, full of the sad insight which is ripeness for death.

Thomas Mann
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 Mann
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.

Thomas Mann
Is not life in itself a thing of goodness, irrespective of whether the course it takes for us can be called a 'happy' one?

Thomas Mann
What they, in their innocence, cannot comprehend is that a properly constituted, healthy, decent man never writes, acts, or composes.

Thomas Mann
A man's dying is more the survivors' affair than his own.

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

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

Thomas Mann
Six months at most after they get here, these young people — and they are mostly young who come — have lost every idea they had, except flirtation and temperature.

Thomas Mann
Love for him, for the human body, was extremely humanitarian an interest and had more educational power than the whole teaching skills of the world!

Thomas Mann
The meeting in the open of two dogs, strangers to each other, is one of the most painful, thrilling, and pregnant of all conceivable encounters; it is surrounded by an atmosphere of the last canniness, presided over by a constraint for which I have no preciser name; they simply cannot pass each other, their mutual embarrassment is frightful to behold.

Thomas Mann