Thomas Mann quotes

Time has no divisions to mark its passage, there is never a thunderstorm 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. (Thomas Mann)
War is a cowardly escape from the problems of peace. View quote
Thomas Mann
A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. View quote
Thomas Mann
All interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life. View quote
Thomas Mann
It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death. View quote
Thomas Mann
A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries. View quote
Thomas Mann
A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth. View quote
Thomas Mann
A man's dying is more the survivors' affair than his own. View quote
Thomas Mann
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. View quote
Thomas Mann
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. View quote
Thomas Mann
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. (Thomas Mann)
Has the world ever been changed by anything save the thought and its magic vehicle the Word? View quote
Thomas Mann
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. View quote
Thomas Mann
What we call National-Socialism is the poisonous perversion of ideas which have a long history in German intellectual life. View quote
Thomas Mann
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! View quote
Thomas Mann
If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it. View quote
Thomas Mann
Reduced to a miserable mass level, the level of a Hitler, German Romanticism broke out into hysterical barbarism. View quote
Thomas Mann
Everything is politics. View quote
Thomas Mann
Order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject - the actual enemy is the unknown. View quote
Thomas Mann
Time cools, time clarifies, no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours. View quote
Thomas Mann
No man remains quite what he was when he recognizes himself. (Thomas Mann)
Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil. View quote
Thomas Mann
He who loves the more is the inferior and must suffer. View quote
Thomas Mann
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. View quote
Thomas Mann
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. View quote
Thomas Mann