Thomas Mann

Speech is civilization itself. The word, even the most contradictory word, preserves contact — it is silence which isolates.

— Thomas Mann

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

— 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

Absolutely everything beloved and cherished of the bourgeoisie, the conservative, the cowardly, and the impotent — the State, family life, secular art and science — was consciously or unconsciously hostile to the religious idea, to the Church, whose innate tendency and permanent aim was the dissolution of all existing worldly orders, and the reconstitution of society after the model of the ideal, the communistic City of God.

— 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

Passionate — that means to live for the sake of living. But one knows that you all live for the sake of experience. Passion, that is self-forgetfulness. But what you all want is self-enrichment. C'est ça. You don't realize what revolting egoism it is, and that one day it will make you the enemies of the human race.

— Thomas Mann

He was all for catharsis and purification, he dreamed of an aesthetic consecration that should cleanse society of luxury, the greed of gold and all unloveliness.

— Thomas Mann

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

— Thomas Mann

It is a pregnant complex, gleaming up from the unconscious, of mother-fixation, sexual desire, and fear.

— Thomas Mann

What was it that drove these thousands into the arms of his art — what but the blissfully sensuous, searing, sense-consuming, intoxicating, hypnotically caressing, heavily upholstered — in a word, the luxurious quality of his music?

— Thomas Mann

Wagner’s art is the most sensational self-portrayal and self-critique of German nature that it is possible to conceive.

— Thomas Mann

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

— Thomas Mann

I hold that we shall one day recognize in Freud’s life-work the cornerstone for the building of a new anthropology and therewith of a new structure, to which many stones are being brought up today, which shall be the future dwelling of a wiser and freer humanity.

— 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

Hold fast the time! Guard it, watch over it, every hour, every minute! Unregarded it slips away, like a lizard, smooth, slippery, faithless, a pixy wife. Hold every moment sacred. Give each clarity and meaning, each the weight of thine awareness, each its true and due fulfillment.

— Thomas Mann

Cruelty is one of the chief ingredients of love, and divided about equally between the sexes: cruelty of lust, ingratitude, callousness, maltreatment, domination. The same is true of the passive qualities, patience under suffering, even pleasure in ill usage.

— Thomas Mann

Profundity must smile.

— 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.

— Thomas Mann

Why does almost everything seem to me like its own parody? Why must I think that almost all, no, all the methods and conventions of art today are good for parody only?

— 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

What a glorious gift is imagination, and what satisfaction it affords!

— Thomas Mann

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

— Thomas Mann

The intellect longs for the delights of the non-intellect, that which is alive and beautiful dans sa stupidité.

— 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

O scenes of the beautiful world! Never have you presented yourself to more appreciative eyes.

— Thomas Mann

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

— 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

Yes, they are carnal, both of them, love and death, and therein lies their terror and their great magic!

— Thomas Mann

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

— Thomas Mann

To place Russian communism on the same moral level with Nazi fascism, because both are totalitarian, is, at best, superficial, in the worse case it is fascism. He who insists on this equality may be a democrat; in truth and in his heart, he is already a fascist, and will surely fight fascism with insincerity and appearance, but with complete hatred only communism.

— Thomas Mann

Here and there, among a thousand other peddlers, are slyly hissing dealers who urge you to come along with them to allegedly "very beautiful" girls, and not only to girls. They keep at it, walk alongside, praising their wares until you answer roughly. They don't know that you have resolved to eat nothing but rice just to escape from sexuality!

— 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

Beauty can pierce one like pain.

— Thomas Mann

The important thing for me, then, is not the "work," but my life. Life is not the means for the achievement of an esthetic ideal of perfection; on the contrary, the work is an ethical symbol of life.

— Thomas Mann

Extraordinary creature! So close a friend, and yet so remote.

— Thomas Mann

The meeting in the open of two dogs, strangers to each other, is one of the most painful, thrilling, and pregnant of all conceivable encounters; it is surrounded by an atmosphere of the last canniness, presided over by a constraint for which I have no preciser name; they simply cannot pass each other, their mutual embarrassment is frightful to behold.

— Thomas Mann

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

— Thomas Mann

I have an epic, not a dramatic nature. My disposition and my desires call for peace to spin my thread, for a steady rhythm in life and art.

— Thomas Mann

This fantastic state of mind, of a humanity that has outrun its ideas, is matched by a political scene in the grotesque style, with Salvation Army methods, hallelujahs and bell-ringing and dervishlike repetition of monotonous catchwords, until everybody foams at the mouth. Fanaticism turns into a means of salvation, enthusiasm into epileptic ecstasy, politics becomes an opiate for the masses, a proletarian eschatology; and reason veils her face.

— 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

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

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

— 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

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.

— 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.

— 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

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

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

— Thomas Mann

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.

— Thomas Mann

A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

— Thomas Mann

Politics has been called the “art of the possible,” and it actually is a realm akin to art insofar as, like art, it occupies a creatively mediating position between spirit and life, the idea and reality.

— Thomas Mann

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

— Thomas Mann

Every reasonable human being should be a moderate Socialist.

— Thomas Mann

I have always been an admirer. I regard the gift of admiration as indispensable if one is to amount to something; I don’t know where I would be without it.

— Thomas Mann

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

— Thomas Mann

The positive thing about the sceptic is that he considers everything possible!

— Thomas Mann

It is not good when people no longer believe in war. Pretty soon they no longer believe in many other things which they absolutely must believe in if they are to be decent men.

— Thomas Mann

Only indifference is free. What is distinctive is never free, it is stamped with its own seal, conditioned and chained.

— Thomas Mann

I have read your book and its terrible documentation with deepest emotion. I cannot describe the mixed feeling of abhorrence and loathing which has filled my heart while perusing these records of human degradation and abominable cruelty. .\xa0.\xa0. To keep quiet would serve only the moral indifference of the world .\xa0.\xa0. You have done your duty in publishing this book and bringing these facts to light.

— 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

They sang their mysterious duo, sang of their nameless hope, their death-in-love, their union unending, lost forever in the embrace of night’s magic kingdom. O sweet night, everlasting night of love! Land of blessedness whose frontiers are infinite!

— Thomas Mann

It had been a moving, tranquil apotheosis, immersed in the transfiguring sunset glow of decline and decay and extinction. An old family, already grown too weary and too noble for life and action, had reached the end of its history, and its last utterances were sounds of music: a few violin notes, full of the sad insight which is ripeness for death.

— Thomas Mann

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

— Thomas Mann

What they, in their innocence, cannot comprehend is that a properly constituted, healthy, decent man never writes, acts, or composes.

— Thomas Mann

This longing for the bliss of the commonplace.

— Thomas Mann

But he would “stay the course” — it was his favorite motto.

— Thomas Mann

Hidden away amongst Aschenbach’s writing was a passage directly asserting that nearly all the great things that exist owe their existence to a defiant despite: it is despite grief and anguish, despite poverty, loneliness, bodily weakness, vice and passion and a thousand inhibitions, that they have come into being at all. But this was more than an observation, it was an experience, it was positively the formula of his life and his fame, the key to his work.

— Thomas Mann

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

Was it an intellectual consequence of this ‘rebirth,’ of this new dignity and rigor, that, at about the same time, his sense of beauty was observed to undergo an almost excessive resurgence, that his style took on the noble purity, simplicity and symmetry that were to set upon all his subsequent works that so evident and evidently intentional stamp of the classical master.

— Thomas Mann

How else is the famous short story ‘A study in Abjection’ to be understood but as an outbreak of disgust against an age indecently undermined by psychology.

— 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

With astonishment Aschenbach noticed that the boy was entirely beautiful. His countenance, pale and gracefully reserved, was surrounded by ringlets of honey-colored hair, and with its straight nose, its enchanting mouth, its expression of sweet and divine gravity, it recalled Greek sculpture of the noblest period.

— Thomas Mann

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

— 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

This was Venice, the flattering and suspect beauty — this city, half fairy tale and half tourist trap, in whose insalubrious air the arts once rankly and voluptuously blossomed, where composers have been inspired to lulling tones of somniferous eroticism.

— 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

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

— 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. Yes, it can even, in the twinkling of an eye, make something like a vagabond of the pedant and Philistine. 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

A harmful truth is better than a useful lie.

— Thomas Mann

Psycho-analyses — how disgusting.

— Thomas Mann

I, for one, have never in my life come across a perfectly healthy human being.

— 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.

— Thomas Mann

Hans Castorp loved music from his heart; it worked upon him much the same way as did his breakfast porter, with deeply soothing, narcotic effect, tempting him to doze.

— 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

No, not of course at all—it is really all hocus-pocus. The days lengthen in the winter-time, and when the longest comes, the twenty-first of June, the beginning of summer, they begin to go downhill again, toward winter. You call that ‘of course’; but if one once loses hold of the fact that it is of course, it is quite frightening, you feel like hanging on to something. It seems like a practical joke—that spring begins at the beginning of winter, and autumn at the beginning of summer. You feel you’re being fooled, led about in a circle, with your eye fixed on something that turns out to be a moving point. A moving point in a circle. For the circle consists of nothing but such transitional points without any extent whatever; the curvature is incommensurable, there is no duration of motion, and eternity turns out to be not ‘straight ahead’ but ‘merry-go-round’!

— Thomas Mann

In effect it seemed to him that, though honor might possess certain advantages, yet shame had others, and not inferior: advantages, even, that were well-nigh boundless in their scope.

— 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.

— Thomas Mann

“Beer, tobacco, and music,” he went on. “Behold the Fatherland.”

— 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

My aversion from music rests on political grounds.

— Thomas Mann

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

— Thomas Mann

Love as a force contributory to disease.

— Thomas Mann

This conflict between the powers of love and chastity … it ended apparently in the triumph of chastity. Love was suppressed, held in darkness and chains, by fear, conventionality, aversion, or a tremulous yearning to be pure.... But this triumph of chastity was only an apparent, a pyrrhic victory. It would break through the ban of chastity, it would emerge — if in a form so altered as to be unrecognizable.

— Thomas Mann

Two principles, according to the Settembrinian cosmogony, were in perpetual conflict for possession of the world: force and justice, tyranny and freedom, superstition and knowledge; the law of permanence and the law of change, of ceaseless fermentation issuing in progress.

— Thomas Mann

The beautiful word begets the beautiful deed.

— Thomas Mann

Writing well was almost the same as thinking well, and thinking well was the next thing to acting well. All moral discipline, all moral perfection derived from the soul of literature, from the soul of human dignity, which was the moving spirit of both humanity and politics. Yes, they were all one, one and the same force, one and the same idea, and all of them could be comprehended in one single word... The word was — civilization!

— 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

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

— 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

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

Six months at most after they get here, these young people — and they are mostly young who come — have lost every idea they had, except flirtation and temperature.

— Thomas Mann

It is a cruel atmosphere down there, cruel and ruthless.

— Thomas Mann

The only religious way to think of death is as part and parcel of life; to regard it, with the understanding and the emotions, as the the inviolable condition of life.

— Thomas Mann

The ancients adorned their sarcophagi with the emblems of life and procreation, and even with obscene symbols; in the religions of antiquity the sacred and the obscene often lay very close together. These men knew how to pay homage to death. For death is worthy of homage as the cradle of life, as the womb of palingenesis.

— Thomas Mann

Irony, forsooth! Guard yourself, Engineer, from the sort of irony that thrives up here; guard yourself altogether from taking on their mental attitude! Where irony is not a direct and classic device of oratory, not for a moment equivocal to a healthy mind, it makes for depravity, it becomes a drawback to civilization, an unclean traffic with the forces of reaction, vice and materialism.

— Thomas Mann

Paradox is the poisonous flower of quietism, the iridescent surface of the rotting mind, the greatest depravity of all.

— Thomas Mann

Analysis as an instrument of enlightenment and civilization is good, in so far as it shatters absurd convictions, acts as a solvent upon natural prejudices, and undermines authority; good, in other words, in that it sets free, refines, humanizes, makes slaves ripe for freedom. But it is bad, very bad, in so far as it stands in the way of action, cannot shape the vital forces, maims life at its roots. Analysis can be a very unappetizing affair, as much so as death.

— Thomas Mann

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

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

— Thomas Mann

What was life? It was warmth, the warmth generated by a form-preserving instability, a fever of matter, which accompanied the process of ceaseless decay and repair of protein molecules that were too impossibly ingenious in structure.

— Thomas Mann

Disease was a perverse, a dissolute form of life.

— Thomas Mann

Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.

— Thomas Mann

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

— Thomas Mann

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

— Thomas Mann

All interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life.

— 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

There is both rhyme and reason in what I say, I have made a dream poem of humanity. I will cling to it. I will be good. I will let death have no mastery over my thoughts. For therein lies goodness and love of humankind, and in nothing else.

— Thomas Mann

Love stands opposed to death. It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death. Only love, not reason, gives kind thoughts.

— Thomas Mann

I will keep faith with death in my heart, yet will remember that faith with death and the dead is only wickedness and dark voluptuousness and enmity against humankind, if it is given power over our thought and contemplation. For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts. And with that, I wake up.

— Thomas Mann

Everything is politics.

— Thomas Mann