I stand between two worlds. I am at home in neither, and I suffer in consequence. You artists call me a bourgeois,… — Thomas Mann Copy Share Image
“Almost every artistic nature is born with a revealing connoisseurial tendency that appreciates injustice so long as it results in beauty and… — Thomas Mann Copy Share Image
“These artists pay little attention to an encircling present that bears no direct relation to the world of work in which they… — Thomas Mann Copy Share Image
Even in a personal sense, after all, art is an intensified life. By art one is more deeply satisfied and more rapidly… — Thomas Mann Copy Share Image
An art whose medium is language will always show a high degree of critical creativeness, for speech is itself a critique of… — Thomas Mann Copy Share Image
“Men do not know why they award fame to one work of art rather than another. Without being in the faintest connoisseurs,… — Thomas Mann Copy Share Image
“What they, in their innocence, cannot comprehend is that a properly constituted, healthy, decent man never writes, acts, or composes.” — Thomas Mann Copy Share Image
“It is probably better that the world knows only the result, not the conditions under which it was achieved; because knowledge of… — Thomas Mann Copy Share Image
Innate in nearly every artistic nature is a wanton, treacherous penchant for accepting injustice when it creates beauty and showing sympathy for… — Thomas Mann Copy Share Image
“His love of the sea had profound roots: the hardworking artist's desire to rest, his longing to get away from the demanding… — Thomas Mann Copy Share Image
“There is a great deal of illusion in a work of art; one could go farther and say that it is illusory… — thomas mann Copy Share Image
“It is as well that the world knows only a fine piece of work and not also its origins, the conditions under… — Thomas Mann Copy Share Image
“One certainly does work badly in spring: and why? Because one’s feelings are being stimulated. And only amateurs think that a creative… — Thomas Mann Copy Share Image
Thought that can merge wholly into feeling, feeling that can merge wholly into thought - these are the artist's highest joy. — Thomas Mann Copy Share Image
To allow only the kind of art that the average man understands is the worst small-mindedness and the murder of mind and… — Thomas Mann Copy Share Image
There were profound reasons for his attachment to the sea: he loved it because as a hardworking artist he needed rest, needed… — Thomas Mann Copy Share Image
“For an important intellectual product to be immediately weighty, a deep relationship or concordance has to exist between the life of its… — Thomas Mann Copy Share Image
“What did one see if one looked in any depth into the world of this writer's fiction? Elegant self-control concealing from the… — Thomas Mann Copy Share Image
Art is the funnel, as it were, through which spirit is poured into life. — Thomas Mann Copy Share Image
For I must tell you that we artists cannot tread the path of Beauty without Eros keeping company with us and appointing… — Thomas Mann Copy Share Image
“What an absurd torture for the artist to know that an audience identifies him with a work that, within himself, he has… — Thomas Mann Copy Share Image
It is most certainly a good thing that the world knows only the beautiful opus but not its origins, not the conditions… — Thomas Mann Copy Share Image
“Yet each, in itself—this was the uncanny, the anti-organic, the life-denying character of them all—each of them was absolutely symmetrical, icily regular… — Thomas Mann Copy Share Image
Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportianate, the absurd and the forbidden. — Thomas Mann Copy Share Image
“Solitude favors the original, the daringly and otherworldly beautiful, the poem. But it also favors the wrongful, the extreme, the absurd, and the forbidden.” — Thomas Mann Copy Share Image
“But what would be our readers’ reaction if we simply refused to get to the bottom of that question?” — Thomas Mann Copy Share Image
What good would politics be, if it didn’t give everyone the opportunity to make moral compromises. — Thomas Mann Copy Share Image
“O, čarobna organsko lepoto, koja se ne sastojiš ni iz uljane boje ni iz kamena, već iz materije žive i raspadljive, pune grozničave tajne… — Thomas Mann Copy Share Image
“I hope that you have nothing against malice, my good engineer. In my eyes it is the brightest sword that reason has against the… — Thomas Mann Copy Share Image
“The days began to fly now, and yet each one of them was stretched by renewed expectations and swollen with silent, private experiences. Yes,… — Thomas Mann Copy Share Image
“A stimulus is a stimulus. The body doesn't give a damn about the meaning of the stimulus. Whether minnows or communion, the sebaceous glands… — Thomas Mann Copy Share Image
It is remarkable how a man cannot summarize his thoughts in even the most general sort of way without betraying himself completely, without putting… — Thomas Mann Copy Share Image