Words matter. These are the best Thomas Mann Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
What is uttered is finished and done with.
Disease makes men more physical, it leaves them nothing but body.
Opinions cannot survive if one has no chance to fight for them.
Respectable means rich, and decent means poor. I should die if I heard my family called decent.
It could become much worse.
Reduced to a miserable mass level, the level of a Hitler, German Romanticism broke out into hysterical barbarism.
Has the world ever been changed by anything save the thought and its magic vehicle the Word?
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.
Animals do not admire each other. A horse does not admire its companion.
We don’t love qualities, we love persons; sometimes by reason of their defects as well as of their qualities.
For the beautiful word begets the beautiful deed.
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.
A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth.
The task of a writer consists of being able to make something out of an idea.
Literature… is the union of suffering with the instinct for form.
He who loves the more is the inferior and must suffer.
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.
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.
For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts.
Only he who desires is amiable and not he who is satiated.
Culture and possessions, there is the bourgeoisie for you.
All interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life.
Every reasonable human being should be a moderate Socialist.
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.
