"Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportianate, the absurd and the forbidden."
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Thomas Mann quotes (page 2 of 4)
78 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Even in a personal sense, after all, art is an intensified life. By art one is more deeply satisfied and more rapidly used up. It engraves on the countenance of its servant the traces of imaginary and intellectual adventures, and even if he has outwardly existed in cloistral tranquility, it leads in the long term to overfastidiousness, over-refinement, nervous fatigue and overstimulation, such as can seldom result from a life of the most extravagant passions and pleasures."
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"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."
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"We don't love qualities, we love persons; sometimes by reason of their defects as well as of their qualities."
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"A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries."
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"Reduced to a miserable mass level, the level of a Hitler, German Romanticism broke out into hysterical barbarism."
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"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."
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"What good would politics be, if it didn’t give everyone the opportunity to make moral compromises."
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"A lonely, quiet person has observations and experiences that are at once both more indistinct and more penetrating than those of one more gregarious; his thoughts are weightier, stranger, and never without a tinge of sadness. . . . Loneliness fosters that which is original, daringly and bewilderingly beautiful, poetic. But loneliness also fosters that which is perverse, incongruous, absurd, forbidden."
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"We do not fear being called meticulous, inclining as we do to the view that only the exhaustive can be truly interesting."
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"The observations and encounters of a solitary, taciturn man are vaguer and at the same times more intense than those of a sociable man; his thoughts are deeper, odder and never without a touch of sadness. Images and perceptions that could be dismissed with a glance, a laugh, an exchange of opinions, occupy him unduly, become more intense in the silence, become significant, become an experience, an adventure, an emotion. Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportionate, the absurd and the forbidden."
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"People's behavior makes sense if you think about it in terms of their goals, needs, and motives."
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"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!"
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"Time cools, time clarifies; no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours."
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"Technology and comfort - having those, people speak of culture, but do not have it."
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"Isn't it grand, isn't it good, that language has only one word for everything we associate with love - from utter sanctity to the most fleshly lust? The result is perfect clarity in ambiguity, for love cannot be disembodied even in its most sanctified forms, nor is it without sanctity even at its most fleshly. Love is always simply itself, both as a subtle affirmation of life and as the highest passion; love is our sympathy with organic life."
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"There is only one real misfortune: to forfeit one's own good opinion of oneself. Lose your complacency, once betray your own self-contempt and the world will unhesitatingly endorse it."
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"Animals do not admire each other. A horse does not admire its companion."
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"I tell them that if they will occupy themselves with the study of mathematics they will find in it the best remedy against the lusts of the flesh."
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"He who loves the more is the inferior and must suffer."
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