Thomas Mann Quotes
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It is most certainly a good thing that the world knows only the beautiful opus but not its origins, not the conditions of its creation; for if people knew the sources of the artist's inspiration, that knowledge would often confuse them, alarm them, and thereby destroy the effects of excellence. strange hours! strangely enervating labor! bizarrely fertile intercourse of the mind with a body!
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Order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject.
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Isn't it grand, isn't it good, that language has only one word for everything we associate with love - from utter sanctity to the most fleshly lust? The result is perfect clarity in ambiguity, for love cannot be disembodied even in its most sanctified forms, nor is it without sanctity even at its most fleshly. Love is always simply itself, both as a subtle affirmation of life and as the highest passion; love is our sympathy with organic life.
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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.
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…What our age needs, what it demands, what it will create for itself, is—terror.
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There were profound reasons for his attachment to the sea: he loved it because as a hardworking artist he needed rest, needed to escape from the demanding complexity of phenomena and lie hidden on the bosom of the simple and tremendous; because of a forbidden longing deep within him that ran quite contrary to his life's task and was for that very reason seductive, a longing for the unarticulated and immeasurable, for eternity, for nothingness. To rest in the arms of perfection is the desire of any man intent upon creating excellence; and is not nothingness a form of perfection?
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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.
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Only love, and not reason, yields kind thoughts.
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Technology and comfort - having those, people speak of culture, but do not have it.
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He took in the squeaky music, the vulgar and pining melodies, because passion immobilizes good taste and seriously considers what soberly would be thought of as funny and to be resented.
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The accouterments of life were so rich and varied, so elaborated, that almost no place at all was left for life itself. Each and every accessory was so costly and beautiful that it had an existence above and beyond the purpose it was meant to serve – confusing the observer and absorbing attention.
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A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth.
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What good would politics be, if it didn’t give everyone the opportunity to make moral compromises.
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No man remains quite what he was when he recognizes himself.
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In books we never find anything but ourselves. Strangely enough, that always gives us great pleasure, and we say the author is a genius.
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War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.
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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.
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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.
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Art is the funnel, as it were, through which spirit is poured into life.
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We don't love qualities, we love persons; sometimes by reason of their defects as well as of their qualities.
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Time cools, time clarifies; no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours.
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For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts.
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Everything is politics.
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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.
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What we call National-Socialism is the poisonous perversion of ideas which have a long history in German intellectual life.
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One must die to life in order to be utterly a creator.
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Yes, they are carnal, both of them, love and death, and therein lies their terror and their great magic!
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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.
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A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
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Is not life in itself a thing of goodness, irrespective of whether the course it takes for us can be called a 'happy' one?
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