Thomas Mann quotes - page 4

Gustav Aschenbach was the writer who spoke for all those who work on the brink of exhaustion, who labor and are heavy-laden, who are worn out already but still stand upright, all those moralists of achievement who are slight of stature and scanty of resources, but who yet, by some ecstasy of the will and by wise husbandry, manage at least for a time to force their work into a semblance of greatness. (Thomas Mann)
By the approach through abnormality we have succeeded in penetrating most deeply into the darkness of human nature ... The literary person should be the last person to be surprised at this fact. Sooner might he be surprised that he, considering his strong generally and individual tendency, should have so late become aware of the close sympathetic relations which connected his own existence with psychoanalytic research and the life-work of Sigmund Freud. I realized this connection only at a time when his achievement was no longer thought of as merely a therapeutic method, whether recognized or disputed; when it had long since outgrown his purely medical implications and become a world movement which penetrated into every field of science and every domain of the intellect: literature, the history of art, religion and prehistory; mythology, folklore, pedagogy, and what not.
Thomas Mann
Beauty can pierce one like pain.
Thomas Mann
In the Word is involved the unity of humanity, the wholeness of the human problem, which permits nobody to separate the intellectual and artistic from the political and social, and to isolate himself within the ivory tower of the "cultural" proper.
Thomas Mann
The deep conviction... that nothing good for Germany or the world can come out of the present German regime, has made me avoid the country in whose spiritual tradition I am more deeply rooted than are those who for three years have been trying to find courage enough to declare before the world that I am not a German. And I feel to the bottom of my heart that I have done right in the eyes of my contemporaries and of posterity.
Thomas Mann
Our air up here is good for the disease - I mean good against the disease,... but it is also good for the disease.
Thomas Mann
I admire the proud and cold who go adventuring on the paths of great and demoniac beauty, and scorn "man" - but I do not envy them. For if anything is capable of making a poet out of a man of letters, it is this plebeian love of mine for the human, living, and commonplace. All warmth, all goodness, all humor is born of it, and it almost seems to me as if it were that love itself, of which it is written that a man might speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and yet without it be no more than sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal.
Thomas Mann
We are most likely to get angry and excited in our opposition to some idea when we ourselves are not quite certain of our own position, and are inwardly tempted to take the other side.
Thomas Mann
Frau Stöhr ... began to talk about how fascinating it was to cough.... Sneezing was much the same thing. You kept on wanting to sneeze until you simply couldn't stand it any longer; you looked as if you were tipsy; you drew a couple of breaths, then out it came, and you forgot everything else in the bliss of the sensation. Sometimes the explosion repeated itself two or three times. That was the sort of pleasure life gave you free of charge.
Thomas Mann
A black pall, you know, with a silver cross on it, or R. I. P. - requiescat in pace - you know. That seems to me the most beautiful expression - I like it much better than ‘He is a jolly good fellow,' which is simply rowdy.
Thomas Mann
It is a pregnant complex, gleaming up from the unconscious, of mother-fixation, sexual desire, and fear. (Thomas Mann)
The invention of printing and the Reformation are and remain the two outstanding services of central Europe to the cause of humanity.
Thomas Mann
The positive thing about the sceptic is that he considers everything possible!
Thomas Mann
This music of yours. A manifestation of the highest energy - not at all abstract, but without an object, energy in a void, in pure ether - where else in the universe does such a thing appear? We Germans have taken over from philosophy the expression ‘in itself,' we use it every day without much idea of the metaphysical. But here you have it, such music is energy itself, yet not as idea, rather in its actuality. I call your attention to the fact that is almost the definition of God. Imitatio Dei - I am surprised it is not forbidden.
Thomas Mann
The purifying, healing influence of literature, the dissipating of passions by knowledge and the written word, literature as the path to understanding, forgiveness and love, the redeeming might of the word, the literary spirit as the noblest manifestation of the spirit of man, the writer as perfected type, as saint.
Thomas Mann
He is no longer with me-by my orders-but then that is merel the carrying-out of an order, after all a kind of negative being-with-me, as he would say. As for any independent life which Bashan might lead without me during these hours-that is not to be thought of.
Thomas Mann
Unhappy German nation, how do you like the Messianic role allotted to you, not by God, nor by destiny, but by a handful of perverted and bloody-minded men?
Thomas Mann
How strange a vehicle it is, coming down unchanged from times of old romance, and so characteristically black, the way no other thing is black except a coffin - a vehicle evoking lawless adventures in the plashing stillness of night, and still more strongly evoking death itself, the bier, the dark obsequies, the last silent journey!
Thomas Mann
It often happens that an old family, with traditions that are entirely practical, sober and bourgeois, undergoes in its declining days a kind of artistic transfiguration.
Thomas Mann
Speech is civilization itself. The word, even the most contradictory word, preserves contact - it is silence which isolates.
Thomas Mann
He remembered the dissolute adventures in which his senses, his nervous system and his mind had indulged; he saw himself corroded by irony and intellect, laid waste and paralyzed by insight, almost exhausted by the fevers and chills of creation, helplessly and contritely tossed to and fro between gross extremes, between saintly austerity and lust - oversophisticated and impoverished, worn out by cold, rare artificial ecstasies, lost, ravaged, racked and sick - and he sobbed with remorse and nostalgia. (Thomas Mann)
That daily the night falls; that over stresses and torments, cares and sorrows the blessing of sleep unfolds, stilling and quenching them; that every anew this draught of refreshment and lethe is offered to our parching lips, ever after the battle this mildness laves our shaking limbs, that from it, purified from sweat and dust and blood, strengthened, renewed, rejuvenated, almost innocent once more, almost with pristine courage and zeal we may go forth again - these I hold to be the benignest, the most moving of all the great facts of life.
Thomas Mann
Never had he felt the joy of the word more sweetly, never had he known so clearly that Eros dwells in language.
Thomas Mann
As a science of the unconscious it is a therapeutic method, in the grand style, a method overarching the individual case. Call this, if you choose, a poet's utopia.
Thomas Mann
In certain respects, particularly economically, National-Socialism is nothing but bolshevism. These two are hostile brothers of whom the younger has learned everything from the older, the Russian excepting only morality.
Thomas Mann