Thomas Mann Quotes

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

A harmful truth is better than a useful lie.

Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.

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

Order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject.

Laughter is a sunbeam of the soul.

Stupid — well, there are so many kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst.

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

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.

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

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

People's behavior makes sense if you think about it in terms of their goals, needs, and motives.

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

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

Every reasonable human being should be a moderate Socialist.

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

Only love, and not reason, yields kind thoughts.

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.

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.

He who loves the more is the inferior and must suffer.

Distance in a straight line has no mystery. The mystery is in the sphere.

There is only one real misfortune: to forfeit one's own good opinion of oneself. Lose your complacency, once betray your own self-contempt and the world will unhesitatingly endorse it.

A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.

Nothing is more curious and awkward than the relationship of two people who only know each other with their eyes — who meet and observe each other daily, even hourly and who keep up the impression of disinterest either because of morals or because of a mental abnormality. Between them there is listlessness and pent-up curiosity, the hysteria of an unsatisfied, unnaturally suppressed need for communion and also a kind of tense respect. Because man loves and honors man as long as he is not able to judge him, and desire is a product of lacking knowledge.

I don't think anyone is thinking long-term now.