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56 Thoughtful Quotes From Thomas Mann

Thomas Mann was born in Lübeck on June 6, 1875. Born to a German father and a German / Portuguese-Creole Brazilian mother, Thomas Mann was a German novelist, short story writer and social critic of his times.

In 1929, hed receive the Nobel prize in Literature, for his extraordinary contribution to the field of literature. Some of his best works are: Buddenbrooks, Tonio Kröger which is an autobiographical work, Death in Venice, The Magic Mountain, Tristan, and Doctor Faustus among many others.

Thomas Mann lived in Münich until 1933. During the Weimar Republic he warned his compatriots of the rise of Fascism. He was a vocal opponent of the rise of Nazism in German and through talks and lecture tours around Europe he would be attacking the policy while promoting humanism and freedom.

When the Nazis took power in Germany, in 1933, he moved to Switzerland. In 1936, he lost his German citizenship, and became a citizen of Czechoslovakia. In 1940, he moved to the United States and became an American citizen. After the war, he visited Germany, but refused to settle there. At the age of 80, Thomas Mann died in Zürich, his final home place, in 1955.

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Thomas Mann fight’s against Nazism, his view on being a humanist and his respect for religions and his position as a citizen of the World made him one of the greatest modern German novelists.

Thomas Mann’s quotes are daring, beautiful and will give us all an insight about politics, his views on society and social changes as well as his position on humanism.

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.

Thomas Mann

Everything is politics.

Thomas Mann

I shall need to sleep three weeks on end to get rested from the rest I’ve had.

Thomas Mann

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

Thomas Mann

It could become much worse.

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

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

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

Thomas Mann

Literature… is the union of suffering with the instinct for form.

Thomas Mann

For to be poised against fatality, to meet adverse conditions gracefully, is more than simple endurance; it is an act of aggression, a positive triumph.

Thomas Mann

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

Thomas Mann

For the myth is the foundation of life; it is the timeless schema, the pious formula into which life flows when it reproduces its traits out of the unconscious.

Thomas Mann

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

Thomas Mann

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.

Thomas Mann

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

Thomas Mann

Every reasonable human being should be a moderate Socialist.

Thomas Mann

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

Thomas Mann

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

Thomas Mann

Culture and possessions, there is the bourgeoisie for you.

Thomas Mann

But my deepest and most secret love belongs to the fair-haired and the blue-eyed, the bright children of life, the happy, the charming and the ordinary.

Thomas Mann

Animals do not admire each other. A horse does not admire its companion.

Thomas Mann

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

Thomas Mann

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

Thomas Mann

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

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

For the beautiful word begets the beautiful deed.

Thomas Mann

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

Thomas Mann

One must die to life in order to be utterly a creator.

Thomas Mann

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

Thomas Mann

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

Thomas Mann

Psycho-analyses, how disgusting.

Thomas Mann

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

Thomas Mann

Respectable means rich, and decent means poor. I should die if I heard my family called decent.

Thomas Mann

One 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

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

Thomas Mann

The only religious way to think of death is as part and parcel of life.

Thomas Mann

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

Thomas Mann

What is uttered is finished and done with.

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

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

Thomas Mann

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

Thomas Mann

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.

Thomas Mann

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

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

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

Thomas Mann

The task of a writer consists of being able to make something out of an idea.

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

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

Speech is civilization itself.

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

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

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

Thomas Mann

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

Thomas Mann

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

Thomas Mann

A harmful truth is better than a useful lie.

Thomas Mann

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

Thomas Mann

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.

Thomas Mann