Thomas Mann Quotes
Most popular Thomas Mann Quotes
Speech is civilization itself.
Beauty can pierce one like a pain.
The beautiful word begets the beautiful deed.
It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.
Act like a man of thought - Think like a man of action.
Opinions cannot survive if one has no chance to fight for them.
War is nothing but a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.
Human reason needs only to will more strongly than fate, and she is fate.
There are so many different kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst.
A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it.
To rest in the arms of perfection is the desire of any man intent upon creating excellence.
We artists cannot tread the path of Beauty without Eros keeping company with us and appointing himself as our guide.
Language is civilization itself. The Word, even the most contradictory word, binds us together. Wordlessness isolates.
Speech is civilization itself. The word, even the most contradictory word, preserves contact—it is silence which isolates.
Time has no divisions to mark its passage; there is never a thunderstorm to announce the beginning of a new year. 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.
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.
For in almost every artist's nature is inborn a wanton and treacherous proneness to side with the beauty that breaks hearts, to single out aristocratic pretensions and pay them homage.
There is at bottom only one problem in the world, and this is its name. How does one break through? How does one get into the open? How does one burst the cocoon and become a butterfly?
I have always been an admirer. I regard the gift of admiration to be, by all odds, the most indispensable for self-improvement. Frankly, I cannot imagine where I would now be without it.
Time has no division 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.
To be grateful for all life's blessings...is the best condition for a happy life. A joke, a good meal, a fine spring day, a work of art, a human personality, a voice, a glance—but this is not all. For there is another kind of gratitude...the feeling that makes us thankful for suffering, for the hard and heavy things of life, for the deepening of our natures which perhaps only suffering can bring.
For in almost every artist's nature is inborn a wanton and treacherous proneness to side with the beauty that breaks hearts.
