Thomas Mann was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and Nobel Prize laureate. He is best known for his novel Buddenbrooks, which documented the decline of a wealthy German merchant family over the course of several generations, and his novella Death in Venice. He was also known for his essays on Goethe, Schiller, and Nietzsche, and for his reflections on the decline of Europe and its culture in the early twentieth century.
What is the most famous quote by Thomas Mann ?
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.
— Thomas Mann
What can you learn from Thomas Mann (Life Lessons)
- Thomas Mann taught us to be open to new ideas and to embrace change, as he was constantly reinventing himself throughout his life.
- He also showed us the importance of hard work and dedication, as he wrote many acclaimed works despite facing numerous obstacles.
- Lastly, he taught us to never give up, as he persevered through difficult times and eventually achieved success in his career.
The most memorable Thomas Mann quotes that are guaranted to improve your brain
Following is a list of the best Thomas Mann quotes, including various Thomas Mann inspirational quotes, and other famous sayings by Thomas Mann.
Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.
Order and simplification are the first steps towards the mastery of a subject.
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.
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.
Order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject.
War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.
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.
Stupid — well, there are so many kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst.
Literary quotes by Thomas Mann
Laughter is a sunbeam of the soul.
A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.
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.
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.
If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it.
Opinions cannot survive if one has no chance to fight for them.
Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry.
But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportianate, the absurd and the forbidden.
Quotations by Thomas Mann that are philosophical and satirical
Every reasonable human being should be a moderate Socialist.
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.
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!
A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
Human reason needs only to will more strongly than fate, and she is fate.
We do not fear being called meticulous, inclining as we do to the view that only the exhaustive can be truly interesting.
What is uttered is finished and done with.
Extraordinary creature! So close a friend, and yet so remote.
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.
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.
One has the idea of a stupid man as perfectly healthy and ordinary, and of illness as making one refined and clever and unusual.
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.
It is remarkable how a man cannot summarize his thoughts in even the most general sort of way without betraying himself completely, without putting his whole self into it, quite unawares, presenting as if in allegory the basic themes and problems of his life.
Innate in nearly every artistic nature is a wanton, treacherous penchant for accepting injustice when it creates beauty and showing sympathy for and paying homage to aristocratic privilege.
Distance in a straight line has no mystery. The mystery is in the sphere.
Nothing is stranger or more ticklish than a relationship between people who know each other only by sight, who meet and observe each other daily - no hourly - and are nevertheless compelled to keep up the pose of an indifferent stranger, neither greeting nor addressing each other, whether out of etiquette or their own whim.
All interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life.
What pleases the public is lively and vivid delineation which makes no demands on the intellect; but passionate and absolutist youth can only be enthralled by a problem.
I stand between two worlds. I am at home in neither, and I suffer in consequence. You artists call me a bourgeois, and the bourgeois try to arrest me...I don't know which makes me feel worse.
Often I have thought of the day when I gazed for the first time at the sea. The sea is vast, the sea is wide, my eyes roved far and wide and longed to be free. But there was the horizon. Why a horizon, when I wanted the infinite from life?
No man remains quite what he was when he recognizes himself.
What we call National-Socialism is the poisonous perversion of ideas which have a long history in German intellectual life.
Speech is civilization itself. The word... preserves contact -- it is silence which isolates.
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.
He took in the squeaky music, the vulgar and pining melodies, because passion immobilizes good taste and seriously considers what soberly would be thought of as funny and to be resented.
I have always been an admirer. I regard the gift of admiration as indispensable if one is to amount to something; I don't know where I would be without it.
The only religious way to think of death is as part and parcel of life.
The accouterments of life were so rich and varied, so elaborated, that almost no place at all was left for life itself. Each and every accessory was so costly and beautiful that it had an existence above and beyond the purpose it was meant to serve – confusing the observer and absorbing attention.
Only he who desires is amiable and not he who is satiated.
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.
Culture and possessions, there is the bourgeoisie for you.
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.
The observations and encounters of a devotee of solitude and silence are at once less distinct and more penetrating than those of the sociable man; his thoughts are weightier, stranger, and never without a tinge of sadness. Images and perceptions which might otherwise be easily dispelled by a glance, a laugh, an exchange of comments, concern him unduly, they sink into mute depths, take on significance, become experiences, adventures, emotions.