Thomas Mann Quotes

» A man's dying is more the survivors' affair than his own.

» 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.

» Animals do not admire each other. A horse does not admire its companion.

» It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.

» 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.

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

» It is a strange fact that freedom and equality, the two basic ideas of democracy, are to some extent contradictory. Logically considered, freedom and equality are mutually exclusive, just as society and the individual are mutually exclusive.

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

» There is something suspicious about music, gentlemen. I insist that she is, by her nature, equivocal. I shall not be going too far in saying at once that she is politically suspect.

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

» An art whose medium is language will always show a high degree of critical creativeness, for speech is itself a critique of life: it names, it characterizes, it passes judgment, in that it creates.

» Every reasonable human being should be a moderate Socialist.

» 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.

» 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.

» The task of a writer consists of being able to make something out of an idea.

» What is uttered is finished and done with.

» A harmful truth is better than a useful lie.

» It could become much worse.

» I don't think anyone is thinking long-term now.

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

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

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

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

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

» Respectable means rich, and decent means poor. I should die if I heard my family called decent.

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

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

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

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

» I shall need to sleep three weeks on end to get rested from the rest I've had.

» Literature... is the union of suffering with the instinct for form.

» For I must tell you that we artists cannot tread the path of Beauty without Eros keeping company with us and appointing himself as our guide.

» For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts.

» Disease makes men more physical, it leaves them nothing but body.

» The writer's joy is the thought that can become emotion, the emotion that can wholly become a thought.

» Everything is politics.

» Speech is civilization itself.

» Has the world ever been changed by anything save the thought and its magic vehicle the Word?

» Reduced to a miserable mass level, the level of a Hitler, German Romanticism broke out into hysterical barbarism.

» Psycho-analyses, how disgusting.

» I love and reverence the Word, the bearer of the spirit, the tool and gleaming ploughshare of progress.

» Democracy is timelessly human, and timelessness always implies a certain amount of potential youthfulness.

» For the beautiful word begets the beautiful deed.

» A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.

» For the myth is the foundation of life; it is the timeless schema, the pious formula into which life flows when it reproduces its traits out of the unconscious.

» Only he who desires is amiable and not he who is satiated.

» I never can understand how anyone can not smoke it deprives a man of the best part of life. With a good cigar in his mouth a man is perfectly safe, nothing can touch him, literally.

» One always has the idea of a stupid man as perfectly healthy and ordinary, and of illness as making one refined and clever and unusual.

» 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!

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

» Culture and possessions, there is the bourgeoisie for you.

» One has the idea of a stupid man as perfectly healthy and ordinary, and of illness as making one refined and clever and unusual.

» 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.

» 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 ordinary.

» Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous- to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.

» The Freudian theory is one of the most important foundation stones for an edifice to be built by future generations, the dwelling of a freer and wiser humanity.

Who Said It?

Who Said: "When I see myself on film it makes me smile, I mean making a good living doing what I enjoy is soo much fun. I just hope that everyone has the chance to enjoy life like I do." Click To See

Daily Famous Quote

"The accent of one's birthplace remains in the mind and in the heart as in one's speech." - Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Thomas Mann Quotes

Who Said It?

Daily Famous Quote

Quotes by Author

Quotes by Topic