Thomas Mann Quotes & Sayings

Whoever is unable to stand up for an ideal with his person, his arm, his blood, is unworthy of that ideal, and no matter how intellectual one may become, what matters is that one remains a man. — Thomas Mann

Perfectionism, of course, was something which even as a young man he had come to see as the innermost essence of talent. — Thomas Mann

He was simply not a "hero", which is to say, he did not let his relationship with the man be determined by the woman. — Thomas Mann

A noble and active mind blunts itself against nothing so quickly as the sharp and bitter irritant of knowledge. And certain it is that the youth's constancy of purpose, no matter how painfully conscientious, was shallow beside the mature resolution of the master of his craft, who made a right-about-face, turned his back on the realm of knowledge, and passed it by with averted face, lest it lame his will or power of action, paralyse his feelings or his passions, deprive any of these of their conviction or utility. — Thomas Mann

He had ... regarded travel as a hygienic necessity, which had to be observed against will and inclination. — Thomas Mann

He may have been waiting a long while, in snow or rain, yet his joy at my final appearance knows no resentment at my faithlessness, though I have neglected him all day and brought his hopes to naught. — Thomas Mann

Deep is the well of the past. Should we not call it bottomless? — Thomas Mann

Order and simplification are the first steps towards mastery of a subject — Thomas Mann

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

Inborn in almost every artistic nature is a luxuriant, treacherous bias in favor of the injustice that creates beauty, a tendency to sympathize with aristocratic preference and pay it homage. A — Thomas Mann

The power of the word, with which the cast away is cast away, pronounces the turning away from all moral uncertainty, from every sympathy with the abyss, the reneging of that phrase of compassion, that "to understand all is to forgive all", and what was beginning here was that "wonder of the reborn impartiality", which was briefly mentioned in one of the author's dialogues with not a little mystery. What strange coherence! — Thomas Mann

A secret and ardent stirring within the frozen chastity of the universal. — Thomas Mann

Everything is human. The Spaniard's fear of God, his humility, his solemnity, his scrupulous austerity is a very worthy form of humanity, — Thomas Mann

Some minutes passed before anyone hastened to the aid of the elderly man sitting there collapsed in his chair. They bore him to his room. And before nightfall a shocked and respectful world received the news of his decease. — Thomas Mann

But even those five-and-forty minutes were too long, the bored me
and boredom is the coldest thing in the world. — Thomas Mann

No man remains quite what he was when he recognizes himself. — Thomas Mann

For when you come to think of it, which is the real shape of the glowworm: the insignificant little creature crawling about on the palm of you hand, or the poetic spark that swims through the summer night? — Thomas Mann

Elegant self-control concealing from the world's eyes until the very last moment a state of inner disintegration and biological decay; sallow ugliness, sensuously marred and worsted, which nevertheless is able to fan its smouldering concupiscence to a pure flame, and even to exalt itself to mastery in the realm of beauty; pallid impotence, which from the glowing depths of the spirit draws strength to cast down a whole proud people at the foot of the Cross and set its own foot upon them as well; gracious poise and composure in the empty austere service of form; the false, dangerous life of the born deceiver, his ambition and his art which lead so soon to exhaustion - to contemplate all these destinies, and many others like them, was to doubt if there is any other heroism at all but the heroism of weakness. In any case, what other heroism could be more in keeping with the times? — Thomas Mann

Mere knowledge of human psychology would in itself infallibly make us despondent if we were not cheered and kept alert by the satisfaction of expressing it. — Thomas Mann

But the boredom of Frau Spatz had by now reached that pitch where it distorts the countenance of man, makes the eyes protrude from the head, and lends the features a corpselike and terrifying aspect. More than that, this music acted on the nerves that controlled her digestion, producing in her dyspeptic organism such malaise that she was really afraid she would have an attack. — Thomas Mann

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

Solitude favors the original, the daringly and otherworldly beautiful, the poem. But it also favors the wrongful, the extreme, the absurd, and the forbidden. — Thomas Mann

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

The observations and encounters of a solitary, taciturn man are vaguer and at the same times more intense than those of a sociable man; his thoughts are deeper, odder and never without a touch of sadness. Images and perceptions that could be dismissed with a glance, a laugh, an exchange of opinions, occupy him unduly, become more intense in the silence, become significant, become an experience, an adventure, an emotion. Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportionate, the absurd and the forbidden. — Thomas Mann

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

The lowest animal forms had no nervous systems, still less a cerebrum; yet no one would venture to deny them the capacity for responding to stimuli. One could suspend life; not merely particular sense-organs, not only nervous reactions, but life itself. One could temporarily suspend the irritability to sensation of every form of living matter in the plant as well as in the animal kingdom; one could narcotize ova and spermatozoa with chloroform, chloral hydrate, or morphine. Consciousness, then, was simply a function of matter organized into life; a function that in higher manifestations turned upon its avatar and became an effort to explore and explain the phenomenon it displayed - a hopeful-hopeless project of life to achieve self-knowledge, nature in recoil - and vainly, in the event, since she cannot be resolved in knowledge, nor life, when all is said, listen to itself. — Thomas Mann

Thought that can merge wholly into feeling, feeling that can merge wholly into thought - these are the artist's highest joy. — Thomas Mann

M. He has waited so long-and we all know what torture waiting can be! His whole life is waiting-waiting for the next walk in the open, a waiting that begins as soon as he is rested from the last one. Even his night consists of waiting; for his sleep is distributed throughout the whole
twenty-four hours of the day, with many a little nap on the grass in the garden, the sun shining down warm on his coat, or behind the curtains of his kennel, to break up and shorten the empty spaces of the day. — Thomas Mann

He probably was mediocre after all, though in a very honorable sense of that word. — Thomas Mann

We do not fear being called meticulous, inclining as we do to the view that only the exhaustive can be truly interesting. — Thomas Mann

Innate in nearly every artistic nature is a wanton, treacherous penchant for accepting injustice when it creates beauty and showing sympathy for and paying homage to aristocratic privilege. — Thomas Mann

The experiences of a man who lives alone and in silence are both vaguer and more penetrating than those of people in society; his thoughts are heavier, more odd, and touched always with melancholy. Images and observations which could easily be disposed of by a glance, a smile, an exchange of opinion, will occupy him unbearably, sink deep into the silence, become full of meaning, become life, adventure, emotion. Loneliness ripens the eccentric, the daringly and estrangingly beautiful, the poetic. But loneliness also ripens the perverse, the disproportionate, the absurd, and the illicit. — Thomas Mann

The perishableness of life ... imparts value, dignity, interest to life. — Thomas Mann

Richard Wagner once declared that civilization disappears before music like mist before the sun. he never dreamed that one day, for its part, music would disappear before civilization, before democracy, like mist before the sun. — Thomas Mann

It is remarkable how a man cannot summarize his thoughts in even the most general sort of way without betraying himself completely, without putting his whole self into it, quite unawares, presenting as if in allegory the basic themes and problems of his life. — Thomas Mann

LCSH terms that are "orphans" in terms of their individual coverage are seldom orphans in terms of their relationships. — Thomas Mann

What pleases the public is lively and vivid delineation which makes no demands on the intellect; but passionate and absolutist youth can only be enthralled by a problem. — Thomas Mann

Who can understand the deeply bonded alloy of order and intemperance that is its foundation? — Thomas Mann

Space, like time, engenders forgetfulness; but it does so by setting us bodily free from our surroundings and giving us back our primitive, unattached state ... Time, we say, is Lethe; but change of air is a similar draught, and, if it works less thoroughly, does so more quickly. — Thomas Mann

romping in pedagogically forbidden territory. They — Thomas Mann

It could become much worse. — Thomas Mann

Travelers prove their lack of education if they make fun of the customs and values of their hosts, and the qualities that do a person honour are many and varied. — Thomas Mann

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. — Thomas Mann

Often I have thought of the day when I gazed for the first time at the sea.
The sea is vast, the sea is wide, my eyes roved far and wide and longed to be
free. But there was the horizon. Why a horizon, when I wanted the infinite
from life? — Thomas Mann

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

Deep is the well of the past. — Thomas Mann

... What our age needs, what it demands, what it will create for itself, is - terror. — Thomas Mann

Only he who desires is amiable and not he who is satiated. — Thomas Mann

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. — Thomas Mann

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. — Thomas Mann

You will lead, you will strike up the march of the future, boys will swear by your name, and thanks to your madness they will no longer need to be mad. — Thomas Mann

Yes, like watching someone flog a dead horse into obedience, Settembrini scoffed; to which Naphta replied that since for our sin God had visited our bodies with the gruesome ignominy of rot and decay, there was no indignity in the same body's receiving an occasional beating - which immediately brought them to the topic of cremation. — Thomas Mann

He was empty within. There was no stimulus, no absorbing task into which he could throw himself. But his nervous activity, his inability to be quiet, ... had indeed taken the upper hand and become his master. It was something artificial, a pressure on the nerves, a depressant, in fact ... This craving for activity had become a martyrdom, but it was dissipated in a host of trivialities. — Thomas Mann

At thirty a man steps out of the darkness and wasteland of preparation into active life it is the time to show oneself, the time of fulfillment. — Thomas Mann

The diaries of opium-eaters record how, during the brief period of ecstasy, the drugged person's dreams have a temporal scope of ten, thirty, sometimes sixty years or even surpass all limits of man's ability to experience time
dreams, that is, whose imaginary time span vastly exceeds their actual duration and which are characterized by an incredible diminishment of the experience of time, with images thronging past so swiftly that, as one hashish-smoke puts it, the intoxicated user's brain seems to have something removed, like the mainspring from a broken watch. — Thomas Mann

I hope that you have nothing against malice, my good engineer. In my eyes it is the brightest sword that reason has against the powers of darkness and ugliness. Malice, sir, is the spirit of criticism, and criticism marks the origin of progress and enlightenment. — 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. — Thomas Mann

Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportianate, the absurd and the forbidden. — Thomas Mann

Like any lover, he desired to please; suffered agonies at the thought of failure. — Thomas Mann

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

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. — Thomas Mann

Disease makes men more physical, it leaves them nothing but body. — Thomas Mann

Nothing is stranger or more ticklish than a relationship between people who know each other only by sight, who meet and observe each other daily - no hourly - and are nevertheless compelled to keep up the pose of an indifferent stranger, neither greeting nor addressing each other, whether out of etiquette or their own whim. — Thomas Mann

Time drowns in the unmeasured monotony of space. Where uniformity reigns, movement from point to point is no longer movement; and where movement is no longer movement, there is no time. — Thomas Mann

He worked, not like a man who works that he may live; but as one who is bent on doing nothing but work; having no regard for himself as a human being but only as a creator; moving about grey and unobtrusive among his fellows like an actor without his make-up, who counts for nothing as soon as he stops representing something else. — Thomas Mann

Miss von Osterloh had looked through it once during an idle fifteen minutes and pronunce it "quite sophisticated," which veredict was her euphemism for "inhumanly boring. — Thomas Mann

He loved the ocean for deep-seated reasons: because of that yearning for rest, when the hard-pressed artist hungers to shut out the exacting multiplicities of experience and hide himself on the breast of the simple, the vast; and because of a forbidden hankering - seductive, by virtue of its being directly opposed to his obligations - after the incommunicable, the incommensurate, the eternal, the non-existent. To be at rest in the face of perfection is the hunger of every one who is aiming at excellence; and what is the nonexistent but a form of perfection? — Thomas Mann

To be young means to be original, to have remained nearer to the sources of life: it means to be able to stand up and shake off the fetters of an outlived civilization, to dare
where others lack the courage
to plunge again into the elemental. — Thomas Mann

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. — Thomas Mann

I love and reverence the Word, the bearer of the spirit, the tool and gleaming ploughshare of progress. — 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! — Thomas Mann

War! It is purification, liberation, an enormous hope ... The victory of Germany will be a paradox, nay, a wonder: a victory of the soul over numbers ... The German soul is opposed to the pacifist ideal of civilization, for is not peace the element, of civil corruption? — Thomas Mann

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. — Thomas Mann

And for its part, what was life? Was it perhaps only an infectious disease of matter - just as the so-called spontaneous generation of matter was perhaps only an illness, a cancerous stimulation of the immaterial? — Thomas Mann

The Ladies Buddenbrook from Breite Strasse did not weep, however - it was not their custom. Their faces, a little less caustic than usual at least, expressed a gentle satisfaction at death's impartiality. — Thomas Mann

You are stronger than I. I have no armour for the struggle between us, I have only the Word, avenging weapon of the weak. Today I have availed myself of this weapon. This letter is nothing but an act of revenge - you see how honourable I am - and if any word of mine is sharp and bright and beautiful enough to strike home, to make you feel the presence of a power you do not know, to shake even a minute your robust equilibrium, I shall rejoice indeed. - Tristan — Thomas Mann

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

Thomas Buddenbrook's existence was no different from that of an actor - an actor whose lfe has become one long production, which but for a few hours for relaxation, consumes him unceasingly. — Thomas Mann

Nearly everything great owes its existence to "despites": despite misery and affliction, poverty, desolation, physical debility, vice, passion, and a thousand other obstacles. — Thomas Mann

There is a great deal of illusion in a work of art; one could go farther and say that it is illusory in and of itself, as a "work." Its ambition is to make others believe that it was not made but rather simply arose, burst forth from Jupiter's head like Pallas Athena fully adorned in enchased armor. But that is only a pretense. No work has ever come into being that way. It is indeed work, artistic labor for the purpose of illusion-and now the question arises whether, given the current state of our consciousness, our comprehension, and our sense of truth, the game is still permissible, still intellectually possible, can still be taken seriously; whether the work as such, as a self-sufficient and harmonically self-contained structure, still stands in a legitimate relation to our problematical social condition, with its total insecurity and lack of harmony; whether all illusion, even the most beautiful, and especially the most beautiful, has not become a lie today. — Thomas Mann

Almost every artistic nature is born with a revealing connoisseurial tendency that appreciates injustice so long as it results in beauty and applauds, even worships aristocratic privilege. — Thomas Mann

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. — Thomas Mann

In books we never find anything but ourselves. Strangely enough, that always gives us great pleasure, and we say the author is a genius. — Thomas Mann

Which seemed to hover in a limbo between creation and decay ... — Thomas Mann

He always knows instantly whether I have chosen the wild or the world, directly I get outside the door. — Thomas Mann

Truth, and the freedom to seek it, are not luxury-products which enervate a people and unfit them for the struggle of life. They belong to life, they are life's daily bread. — Thomas Mann

since for me speaking French is like speaking without saying anything somehow - with no responsibilities, the way we speak in a dream. — Thomas Mann

There can be no relation more strange, more critical, than that between two beings who know each other only with their eyes, who meet daily, yes, even hourly, eye each other with a fixed regard, and yet by some whim or freak of convention feel constrained to act like strangers. Uneasiness rules between them, unslaked curiosity, a hysterical desire to give rein to their suppressed impulse to recognize and address each other; even, actually, a sort of strained but mutual regard. For one human being instinctively feels respect and love for another human being so long as he does not know him well enough to judge him; and that he does not, the craving he feels is evidence. — Thomas Mann

For at the moment of the final division, the final miniaturization of matter, suddenly the whole cosmos opened up. — Thomas Mann

Passion-means to live for life's sake but I am well aware you Germans live for the sake of experience. Passion means to forget ones self. But you do things in order to enrich yourselves. — Thomas Mann

The child of civilization, remote from birth from wild nature and all her ways, is more susceptible to her grandeur than is her untutored son who has looked at her and lived close to her from childhood up, on terms of prosaic familiarity. The — Thomas Mann

That was one of the advantages of his age, that he could be sure of his mastery in every moment. — Thomas Mann

Often, the outward and visible material signs and symbols of happiness and success only show themselves when the process of decline has already set in. The outer manifestations take time - like the light of that star up there, which may in reality be already quenched, when it looks to us to be shining its brightest. — Thomas Mann

War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace. — Thomas Mann

Only incorrigible bohemians find it boring or laughable when a man of talent outgrows the libertine chrysalis stage and begins to perceive and express the dignity of the intellect, adopting the courtly ways of a solitude replete with bitter suffering and inner battles though eventually gaining a position of power and honor among men. — Thomas Mann

Speech is civilization itself. — Thomas Mann

Prayers and love are learned in the hour when prayer has become impossible and your heart has turned to stone. — Thomas Mann

And then he'd rub his cheeks with cold cream because he'd just shaved and the tears stung. — Thomas Mann

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