Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain Quotes

Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.

Laughter is a sunbeam of the soul.

A harmful truth is better than a useful lie.

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

Is not the pastness of the past the more profound, the more legendary, the more immediately it falls before the present ?

Passionate—that means to live for the sake of living. But one knows that you all live for sake of experience. Passion, that is self-forgetfulness. But what you all want is self-enrichment.

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.

I know I am talking nonsense, but I’d rather go rambling on, and partly expressing something I find it difficult to express, than to keep on transmitting faultless platitudes.

For the sake of goodness and love, man shall grant death no dominion over his thoughts.

There are so many different kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst.