"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."
"Forbearance in the face of fate, beauty constant under torture, are not merely passive. They are a positive achievement, an explicit triumph."
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Source: Thomas Mann (1961). “Stories of a lifetime”
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"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."
"Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil."
"Order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject."
"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."
"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."