Life Quotes by Thomas Mann

Art is the funnel, as it were, through which spirit is poured into life.

— Thomas Mann

The only religious way to think of death is as part and parcel of life.

— Thomas Mann

“...when life still hesitates to touch us, when neither duty nor guilt dares lay a hand upon us”

— Thomas Mann

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

— Thomas Mann

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

— Thomas Mann

“Passion-means to live for life's sake but I am well aware you Germans live for the sake of experience. Passion means to…

— Thomas Mann

I never can understand how anyone can not smoke it deprives a man of the best part of life. With a good…

— Thomas Mann

“Genius is a form of the life force that is deeply versed in illness, that both draws creatively from it and creates…

— Thomas Mann

“Passionate—that means to live for the sake of living. But one knows that you all live for sake of experience. Passion, that…

— 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

An art whose medium is language will always show a high degree of critical creativeness, for speech is itself a critique of…

— 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

“A human being lives out not only his personal life as an individual, but also, consciously or subconsciously, the lives of his…

— Thomas Mann

“(...) nearly all the great things that exist owe their existence to a defiant despite: it is despite grief and anguish, despite…

— Thomas Mann

The accouterments of life were so rich and varied, so elaborated, that almost no place at all was left for life itself.…

— Thomas Mann

“For passion, like crime does not sit well with the sure order and even course of everyday life. It welcomes every loosening…

— Thomas Mann

“Disease, and most specially opprobrious, suppressed, secret disease, creates a certain critical opposition to the world, to mediocre life, disposes a man…

— Thomas Mann

“These artists pay little attention to an encircling present that bears no direct relation to the world of work in which they…

— Thomas Mann

It is remarkable how a man cannot summarize his thoughts in even the most general sort of way without betraying himself completely,…

— Thomas Mann

“But was it not true that there were people, certain individuals, whom one found it impossible to picture dead, precisely because they…

— Thomas Mann

“He undressed, lay down, put out the light. Two names he whispered into his pillow, the few chaste northern syllables that meant…

— Thomas Mann

“Kindly permit me to tell you, sir, that I hate you. I hate you and your child, as I hate the life…

— Thomas Mann

If the years of youth are experienced slowly, while the later years of life hurtle past at an ever-increasing speed, it must…

— Thomas Mann

“Protestantism harbors within it certain elements – just as the Great Reformer himself harbored such elements within his personality. I am thinking…

— Thomas Mann

“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

“And life? Life itself? Was it perhaps only an infection, a sickening of matter? Was that which one might call the original…

— Thomas Mann

“He completely lacked any ardent interest that might have occupied his mind. His interior life was impoverished, had undergone a deterioration so…

— Thomas Mann

“I bear within me the seed, the rudiments, the possibility of life's capacities and endeavors. Where might I be, if I were…

— 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

“And for its part, what was life? Was it perhaps only an infectious disease of matter—just as the so-called spontaneous generation of…

— Thomas Mann

“Truth, and the freedom to seek it, are not luxury-products which enervate a people and unfit them for the struggle of life.…

— 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…

— Thomas Mann

“life of service and humility, of silent subordination and religious training, from which he wrested intellectual pleasures congruent with his”

— Thomas Mann

Is not life in itself a thing of goodness, irrespective of whether the course it takes for us can be called a…

— Thomas Mann

“...nearly everything great owes its existence to “despites”: despite misery and affliction, poverty, desolation, physical debility, vice, passion, and a thousand other…

— Thomas Mann

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

— Thomas Mann

Even in a personal sense, after all, art is an intensified life. By art one is more deeply satisfied and more rapidly…

— Thomas Mann

“His games have a deeper meaning and fascination that adults can no longer fathom and require nothing more than three pebbles, or…

— Thomas Mann

“Consciousness of self was an inherent function of matter once it was organized as life, and if that function was enhanced it…

— Thomas Mann