Thomas Mann

I shall need to sleep three weeks on end to get rested from the rest I've had.

— Thomas Mann

“The one who loves most becomes subordinate and must suffer—his”

— Thomas Mann

I don't think anyone is thinking long-term now.

— Thomas Mann

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

— Thomas Mann

Stupid — well, there are so many kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst.

— Thomas Mann

Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.

— Thomas Mann

“Order and simplification are the first steps towards mastery of a subject”

— Thomas Mann

For the beautiful word begets the beautiful deed.

— Thomas Mann

“Is not the pastness of the past the more profound, the more legendary, the more immediately it falls before the present ?”

— Thomas Mann

“He was simply not a “hero”, which is to say, he did not let his relationship with the man be determined by…

— Thomas Mann

For the myth is the foundation of life; it is the timeless schema, the pious formula into which life flows when it…

— Thomas Mann

“thought Aschenbach. He’s probably not long for this world. And he refused to analyze a certain feeling of satisfaction, or reassurance, which…

— Thomas Mann

Yes, they are carnal, both of them, love and death, and therein lies their terror and their great magic!

— Thomas Mann

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

— Thomas Mann

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

— Thomas Mann

Space, like time, engenders forgetfulness; but it does so by setting us bodily free from our surroundings and giving us back our…

— Thomas Mann

“The Ladies Buddenbrook from Breite Strasse did not weep, however - it was not their custom. Their faces, a little less caustic…

— Thomas Mann

“Death was a blessing, so great, so deep that we can fathom it only at those moments, like this one now, when…

— Thomas Mann

“The discipline and elegance, the hushed serenity and intellectual challenge, the well-ordered and well-tended life, the precise yet richly varied schedule—it all…

— Thomas Mann

“Don't you love to look at coffins? I've always enjoyed looking at one now and then. I think of a coffin as…

— 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…

— Thomas Mann

I stand between two worlds. I am at home in neither, and I suffer in consequence. You artists call me a bourgeois,…

— Thomas Mann

“It was, however, striking—in the best sense of the word—that precisely those rules that corresponded exactly to their overseers’ economic interests enjoyed…

— Thomas Mann

“The fact is that everyone is much too busily preoccupied with himself to be able to form a serious opinion about another…

— Thomas Mann

“a noble and active mind blunts itself against nothing so quickly as the sharp and bitter irritant of knowledge. And certain it…

— Thomas Mann

“You Christians studied them,” Settembrini exclaimed, “studied the classical poets and philosophers until you broke out in a sweat, attempted to make…

— Thomas Mann

“There is a great deal of illusion in a work of art; one could go farther and say that it is illusory…

— thomas mann

“The little hand on time’s clock trips away as though measuring seconds; but God knows how much time it is covering when…

— Thomas Mann

“No, not of course at all—it is really all hocus-pocus. The days lengthen in the winter-time, and when the longest comes, the…

— Thomas Mann

“Who then was the orthodox, who the freethinker? Where lay the true position, the true state of man? Should he descend into…

— Thomas Mann

“I ako je lično shvatimo, umetnost je povišen život. Ona usrećuje dublje, ona troši brže. U lice svoga sluge ona reže tragove…

— Thomas Mann

“The diaries of opium-eaters record how, during the brief period of ecstasy, the drugged person's dreams have a temporal scope of ten,…

— Thomas Mann

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

— Thomas Mann

“... a secret and ardent stirring within the frozen chastity of the universal.”

— Thomas Mann

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

— Thomas Mann

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

— Thomas Mann

Only love, and not reason, yields kind thoughts.

— Thomas Mann

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

— Thomas Mann

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

— Thomas Mann

“...only the exhaustive can be truly interesting.”

— Thomas Mann