Thomas Mann

“I opanował go rodzaj rozczulenia, prosta, a nabożna sympatia do własnego serca, do bijącego ludzkiego serca...”

— Thomas Mann

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

— 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

“He worked, not like a man who works that he may live; but as one who is bent on doing nothing but…

— Thomas Mann

It is a strange fact that freedom and equality, the two basic ideas of democracy, are to some extent contradictory. Logically considered,…

— 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

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

— Thomas Mann

Only love, and not reason, yields kind thoughts.

— Thomas Mann

In books we never find anything but ourselves. Strangely enough, that always gives us great pleasure, and we say the author is…

— Thomas Mann

And then the sly arch-lover that he was, he said the subtlest thing of all: that the lover was nearer the divine…

— Thomas Mann

What a wonderful phenomenon it is, carefully considered, when the human eye, that jewel of organic structures, concentrates its moist brilliance on…

— Thomas Mann

Thought that can merge wholly into feeling, feeling that can merge wholly into thought - these are the artist's highest joy.

— Thomas Mann

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

What we call mourning for our dead is perhaps not so much grief at not being able to call them back; as…

— Thomas Mann

“Frau Stöhr found his remarks amphibious and unfeeling.”

— Thomas Mann

There were profound reasons for his attachment to the sea: he loved it because as a hardworking artist he needed rest, needed…

— 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

“You will lead, you will strike up the march of the future, boys will swear by your name, and thanks to your…

— Thomas Mann

Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also, it gives birth to…

— Thomas Mann

“Order and simplification are the first steps toward mastery of a subject -- the actual enemy is the unknown.”

— Thomas Mann

A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

— 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

The observations and encounters of a devotee of solitude and silence are at once less distinct and more penetrating than those of…

— Thomas Mann

I tell them that if they will occupy themselves with the study of mathematics they will find in it the best remedy…

— 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