Thomas Mann - The Magic Mountain (1924)

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The only religious way to think of death is as part and parcel of life; to regard it, with the understanding and the emotions, as the the inviolable condition of life.

Thomas Mann
Order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject — the actual enemy is the unknown.

Thomas Mann
Love stands opposed to death. It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death. Only love, not reason, gives kind thoughts.

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

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

Thomas Mann
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.

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

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
He thought what a fine thing it was that people made music all over the world, even in the strangest settings — probably even on polar expeditions.

Thomas Mann
I will keep faith with death in my heart, yet will remember that faith with death and the dead is only wickedness and dark voluptuousness and enmity against humankind, if it is given power over our thought and contemplation. For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts. And with that, I wake up.

Thomas Mann
My aversion from music rests on political grounds.

Thomas Mann
The ancients adorned their sarcophagi with the emblems of life and procreation, and even with obscene symbols; in the religions of antiquity the sacred and the obscene often lay very close together. These men knew how to pay homage to death. For death is worthy of homage as the cradle of life, as the womb of palingenesis.

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

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
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
Passionate — that means to live for the sake of living. But one knows that you all live for the sake of experience. Passion, that is self-forgetfulness. But what you all want is self-enrichment. C'est ça. You don't realize what revolting egoism it is, and that one day it will make you the enemies of the human race.

Thomas Mann
The invention of printing and the Reformation are and remain the two outstanding services of central Europe to the cause of humanity.

Thomas Mann
Absolutely everything beloved and cherished of the bourgeoisie, the conservative, the cowardly, and the impotent — the State, family life, secular art and science — was consciously or unconsciously hostile to the religious idea, to the Church, whose innate tendency and permanent aim was the dissolution of all existing worldly orders, and the reconstitution of society after the model of the ideal, the communistic City of God.

Thomas Mann
Language is civilization itself. The Word, even the most contradictory word, binds us together. Wordlessness isolates.

Thomas Mann
We, when we sow the seeds of doubt deeper than the most up-to-date and modish free-thought has ever dreamed of doing, we well know what we are about. Only out of radical skepsis, out of moral chaos, can the Absolute spring, the anointed Terror of which the time has need.

Thomas Mann
Speech is civilisation itself. The word, even the most contradictory word, preserves contact—it is silence which isolates.

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
Writing well was almost the same as thinking well, and thinking well was the next thing to acting well. All moral discipline, all moral perfection derived from the soul of literature, from the soul of human dignity, which was the moving spirit of both humanity and politics. Yes, they were all one, one and the same force, one and the same idea, and all of them could be comprehended in one single word... The word was — civilization!

Thomas Mann
There is both rhyme and reason in what I say, I have made a dream poem of humanity. I will cling to it. I will be good. I will let death have no mastery over my thoughts. For therein lies goodness and love of humankind, and in nothing else.

Thomas Mann
What we call mourning for our dead is perhaps not so much grief at not being able to call them back as it is grief at not being able to want to do so.

Thomas Mann
We come out of the dark and go into the dark again, and in between lie the experiences of our life. But the beginning and end, birth and death, we do not experience; they have no subjective character, they fall entirely in the category of objective events, and that's that.

Thomas Mann
There are so many different kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst.

Thomas Mann