Thomas Mann Quotes

157 Sourced Quotes

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.

Thomas Mann

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

Thomas Mann

The atom was a cosmic system, laden with energy; in which heavenly bodies rioted rotating about a centre like a sun; through whose ethereal space comets drove with the speed of light years, kept in their eccentric orbits by the power of the central body.

Thomas Mann

Disease has nothing refined about it, nothing dignified.

Thomas Mann

Very deep is the well of the past. Should we not call it bottomless?

Thomas Mann

Soon or late, division must yield "units" which, even though in composition, were not organized, and which mediated between life and absence of life; molecular groups, which represented the transition between vitalized organization and mere chemistry.

Thomas Mann

"He does seem rather weird," was Hans Castorp's view. "Some of the things he said were very queer: it sounded as if he meant to say that the sun revolves round the earth."

Thomas Mann