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Thomas Mann [1875-1955] German

Rank: 101
Writer, Novelist

Paul Thomas Mann was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and the 1929 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate.

Death, Love, Beauty, Equality, Freedom, Men, Peace, Poetry, Positive, Society, Time, Truth, War

Quote	Tags	Rank
Order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject.		101
It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.	Death, Love	102
We don't love qualities, we love persons; sometimes by reason of their defects as well as of their qualities.	Love	103
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.	Time	104
The only religious way to think of death is as part and parcel of life.	Death	105
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.	Equality, Freedom, Society	106
Every reasonable human being should be a moderate Socialist.		107
Disease makes men more physical, it leaves them nothing but body.	Men	108
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.	Positive	109
War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.	Peace, War	110
A harmful truth is better than a useful lie.	Truth	111
People's behavior makes sense if you think about it in terms of their goals, needs, and motives.		112
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.		113
For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts.	Death	114
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!		115
Time cools, time clarifies; no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours.		116
Reduced to a miserable mass level, the level of a Hitler, German Romanticism broke out into hysterical barbarism.		117
Animals do not admire each other. A horse does not admire its companion.		118
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.		119
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.		120
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.	Beauty	121
A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.		122
Speech is civilization itself.		123
Democracy is timelessly human, and timelessness always implies a certain amount of potential youthfulness.		124
For the beautiful word begets the beautiful deed.		125
A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.		126
A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth.		201
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.		202
Human reason needs only to will more strongly than fate, and she is fate.		203
If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it.		204
What is uttered is finished and done with.		205
A man's dying is more his survivor's affair than his own.		206
Literature... is the union of suffering with the instinct for form.		207
The writer's joy is the thought that can become emotion, the emotion that can wholly become a thought.		208
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.		209
Only he who desires is amiable and not he who is satiated.		210
What we call National-Socialism is the poisonous perversion of ideas which have a long history in German intellectual life.		211
Culture and possessions, there is the bourgeoisie for you.		212
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.		213
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.	Poetry	214
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.		215
All interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life.		216
The task of a writer consists of being able to make something out of an idea.		217
It could become much worse.		218
One must die to life in order to be utterly a creator.		219
He who loves the more is the inferior and must suffer.		220
Opinions cannot survive if one has no chance to fight for them.		221
I shall need to sleep three weeks on end to get rested from the rest I've had.		222
Everything is politics.		223
Has the world ever been changed by anything save the thought and its magic vehicle the Word?		224
Psycho-analyses, how disgusting.		225
I love and reverence the Word, the bearer of the spirit, the tool and gleaming ploughshare of progress.		226
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.		301
One has the idea of a stupid man as perfectly healthy and ordinary, and of illness as making one refined and clever and unusual.		302
Respectable means rich, and decent means poor. I should die if I heard my family called decent.		303
I don't think anyone is thinking long-term now.		304

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