Thomas Mann Quotes

108 quotes in 1481 categories

• A harmful truth is better than a useful lie.
• Order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject.
• For to be poised against fatality, to meet adverse conditions gracefully, is more than simple endurance; it is an act of aggression, a positive triumph.
• War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.
• A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
• People's behavior makes sense if you think about it in terms of their goals, needs, and motives.
• Time has no divisions to mark its passage, there is never a thunder-storm or blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month…
• Everything is politics.
• We don't love qualities, we love persons; sometimes by reason of their defects as well as of their qualities.
• One must die to life in order to be utterly a creator.
• Every reasonable human being should be a moderate Socialist.
• But my deepest and most secret love belongs to the fair-haired and the blue-eyed, the bright children of life, the happy, the charming and the…
• A solitary, unused to speaking of what he sees and feels, has mental experiences which are at once more intense and less articulate than those…
• A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth.
• A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.
• He who loves the more is the inferior and must suffer.
• A man's dying is more his survivor's affair than his own.
• Speech is civilization itself.
• Time cools, time clarifies; no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours.
• For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts.

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