Thomas Mann Quotes

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

He who loves the more is the inferior and must suffer.

There is only one real misfortune: to forfeit one's own good opinion of oneself. Lose your complacency, once betray your own self-contempt and the world will unhesitatingly endorse it.

This was love at first sight, love everlasting: a feeling unknown, unhoped for, unexpected—in so far as it could be a matter of conscious awareness; it took entire possession of him, and he understood, with joyous amazement, that this was for life.

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

A harmful truth is better than a useful lie.

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 or year. Even when a new century begins it is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols.

A lonely, quiet person has observations and experiences that are at once both more indistinct and more penetrating than those of one more gregarious; his thoughts are weightier, stranger, and never without a tinge of sadness. . . . Loneliness fosters that which is original, daringly and bewilderingly beautiful, poetic. But loneliness also fosters that which is perverse, incongruous, absurd, forbidden.

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

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

If the years of youth are experienced slowly, while the later years of life hurtle past at an ever-increasing speed, it must be habit that causes it. We know full well that the insertion of new habits or the changing of old ones is the only way to preserve life, to renew our sense of time, to rejuvenate, intensify, and retard our experience of time—and thereby renew our sense of life itself. That is the reason for every change of scenery and air..

Even in a personal sense, after all, art is an intensified life. By art one is more deeply satisfied and more rapidly used up. It engraves on the countenance of its servant the traces of imaginary and intellectual adventures, and even if he has outwardly existed in cloistral tranquility, it leads in the long term to overfastidiousness, over-refinement, nervous fatigue and overstimulation, such as can seldom result from a life of the most extravagant passions and pleasures.

What good would politics be, if it didn't give everyone the opportunity to make moral compromises.

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

We don't love qualities, we love persons; sometimes by reason of their defects as well as of their qualities.

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

Opinions cannot survive if one has no chance to fight for them.

A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth.

People's behavior makes sense if you think about it in terms of their goals, needs, and motives.

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

Every reasonable human being should be a moderate Socialist.

We, when we sow the seeds of doubt deeper than the most up-to-date and modish free-thought has ever dreamed of doing, we well know what we are about. Only out of radical skepsis, out of moral chaos, can the Absolute spring, the anointed Terror of which the time has need.

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

Time cools, time clarifies; no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours.

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

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 of a gregarious man.