Thomas Mann Quotes

Speech is civilization itself.

Only love, and not reason, yields kind thoughts.

Forbearance in the face of fate, beauty constant under torture, are not merely passive. They are a positive achievement, an explicit triumph.

For 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.

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

He thought what a fine thing it was that people made music all over the world, even in the strangest settings – probably even on polar expeditions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Discussions should always be held just before going to bed, your rear protected by sleep. How painful, after an intellectual conversation, to have to go about with your mind so stirred up.

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

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

The sweet spot is where duty and delight converge.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The perishableness of life...imparts value, dignity, interest to life.

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

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

Time cools time clarifies no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours.

Habituation is a falling asleep or fatiguing of the sense of time which explains why young years pass slowly while later life flings itself faster and faster upon its course.

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

It is love not reason that is stronger than death.

A human being who is first of all an invalid is all body therein lies his inhumanity and his debasement.

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

What the collective age wants allows and approves is the perpetual holiday from the self.

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