"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."
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Quote collection
Thomas Mann quotes (page 1 of 4)
78 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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."
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"Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil."
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"Order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject."
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"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."
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"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."
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"Stupid — well, there are so many kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst."
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"A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people."
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"War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace."
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"Laughter is a sunbeam of the soul."
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"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."
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"In books we never find anything but ourselves. Strangely enough, that always gives us great pleasure, and we say the author is a genius."
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"A harmful truth is better than a useful lie."
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"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."
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"It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death."
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"Art is the funnel, as it were, through which spirit is poured into life."
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"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."
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"This was love at first sight, love everlasting: a feeling unknown, unhoped for, unexpected--in so far as it could be a matter of conscious awareness; it took entire possession of him, and he understood, with joyous amazement, that this was for life."
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"Is not life in itself a thing of goodness, irrespective of whether the course it takes for us can be called a 'happy' one?"
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"A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth."
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