79+ Thomas Mann Quotes On War, Time And Literary

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. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Thomas Mann on war, time, literary.

Top 10 Thomas Mann Quotes

1. 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.
2. Order and simplification are the first steps towards the mastery of a subject.
3. Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.
4. 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.
5. Order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject.
6. War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.
7. 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.
8. Stupid — well, there are so many kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst.
9. A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
10. Laughter is a sunbeam of the soul.

Thomas Mann Image Quotes

Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil. — Thomas Mann

Order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject. — Thomas Mann

War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace. — Thomas Mann

Thomas Mann Short Quotes

• Opinions cannot survive if one has no chance to fight for them.
• Every reasonable human being should be a moderate Socialist.
• 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.
• What is uttered is finished and done with.
• Extraordinary creature! So close a friend, and yet so remote.
• Distance in a straight line has no mystery. The mystery is in the sphere.
• No man remains quite what he was when he recognizes himself.
• Speech is civilization itself. The word... preserves contact -- it is silence which isolates.
• Only he who desires is amiable and not he who is satiated.

Thomas Mann Quotes About Time

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. — Thomas Mann

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? — Thomas Mann

Hold fast the time! Guard it, watch over it, every hour, every minute! Unregarded it slips away, like a lizard, smooth, slippery, faithless, a pixy wife. Hold every moment sacred. Give each clarity and meaning, each the weight of thine awareness, each its true and due fulfillment. — Thomas Mann

We, when we sow the seeds of doubt deeper than the most up-to-date and modish free-thought has ever dreamed of doing, we well know what we are about. Only out of radical skeptics, out of moral chaos, can the Absolute spring, the anointed Terror of which the time has need. — Thomas Mann

Time has no division to mark its passage, there is never a thunderstorm 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 pistols. — Thomas Mann

(T)here was a story they used to tell at home about a girl whose punishment was that every time she opened her mouth, snakes and toads came out, snakes and toads with every word. The book didn't say what she did about it, but I've always assumed she probably ended up keeping her mouth shut. — Thomas Mann

Thomas Mann Quotes About Life

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. — Thomas Mann

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. — Thomas Mann

All interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life. — Thomas Mann

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. — Thomas Mann

What we call National-Socialism is the poisonous perversion of ideas which have a long history in German intellectual life. — Thomas Mann

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. — Thomas Mann

The only religious way to think of death is as part and parcel of life. — Thomas Mann

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. — Thomas Mann

Is not life in itself a thing of goodness, irrespective of whether the course it takes for us can be called a 'happy' one? — Thomas Mann

The books and magazines streamed in. He could buy them all, they piled up around him and even while he read, the number of those still to be read disturbed him. … they stood in rows, weighing down his life like a possession which he did not succeed in subordinating to his personality. — Thomas Mann

Thomas Mann Quotes About Idea

If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it. — Thomas Mann

One has the idea of a stupid man as perfectly healthy and ordinary, and of illness as making one refined and clever and unusual. — Thomas Mann

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. — Thomas Mann

It is a strange fact that freedom and equality, the two basic ideas of democracy, are to some extent contradictory. Logically considered, freedom and equality are mutually exclusive, just as society and the individual are mutually exclusive. — Thomas Mann

The task of a writer consists of being able to make something out of an idea. — Thomas Mann

Thomas Mann Quotes About Death

It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death. — Thomas Mann

Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportianate, the absurd and the forbidden. — Thomas Mann

Yes, they are carnal, both of them, love and death, and therein lies their terror and their great magic! — Thomas Mann

Thomas Mann Famous Quotes And Sayings

Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil. — Thomas Mann

Order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject. — Thomas Mann

War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace. — Thomas Mann

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. — Thomas Mann

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! — Thomas Mann

We do not fear being called meticulous, inclining as we do to the view that only the exhaustive can be truly interesting. — Thomas Mann

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. — Thomas Mann

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. — Thomas Mann

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. — Thomas Mann

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. — Thomas Mann

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. — Thomas Mann

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. — Thomas Mann

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. — Thomas Mann

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. — Thomas Mann

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. — Thomas Mann

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. — Thomas Mann

Culture and possessions, there is the bourgeoisie for you. — Thomas Mann

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. — Thomas Mann

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. — Thomas Mann

Art is the funnel, as it were, through which spirit is poured into life. — Thomas Mann

And then the sly arch-lover that he was, he said the subtlest thing of all: that the lover was nearer the divine than the beloved; for the god was in the one but not in the other - perhaps the tenderest, most mocking thought that ever was thought, and source of all the guile and secret bliss the lover knows. — Thomas Mann

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. — Thomas Mann

Only love, and not reason, yields kind thoughts. — Thomas Mann

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. — Thomas Mann

It is most certainly a good thing that the world knows only the beautiful opus but not its origins, not the conditions of its creation; for if people knew the sources of the artist's inspiration, that knowledge would often confuse them, alarm them, and thereby destroy the effects of excellence. strange hours! strangely enervating labor! bizarrely fertile intercourse of the mind with a body! — Thomas Mann

Technology and comfort - having those, people speak of culture, but do not have it. — Thomas Mann

…What our age needs, what it demands, what it will create for itself, is—terror. — Thomas Mann

He thought what a fine thing it was that people made music all over the world, even in the strangest settings – probably even on polar expeditions. — Thomas Mann

The meeting in the open of two dogs, strangers to each other, is one of the most painful, thrilling, and pregnant of all conceivable encounters; it is surrounded by an atmosphere of the last canniness, presided over by a constraint for which I have no precise name; they simply cannot pass each other, their mutual embarrassment is frightful to behold. — Thomas Mann

The electrifying influence exercised on a whole generation just after the First World War by Demian...is unforgettable. With uncanny accuracy this poetic work struck the nerve of the times and called forth grateful rapture from a whole youthful generation who believed that an interpreter of their innermost life had risen from their own midst. — Thomas Mann

He probably was mediocre after all, though in a very honorable sense of that word. — Thomas Mann

In books we never find anything but ourselves. Strangely enough, that always gives us great pleasure, and we say the author is a genius. — Thomas Mann

Thought that can merge wholly into feeling, feeling that can merge wholly into thought - these are the artist's highest joy. — Thomas Mann

You ask what is the use of classification, arrangement, systemization? I answer you: order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject-the actual enemy is the unknown. — Thomas Mann

Forbearance in the face of fate, beauty constant under torture, are not merely passive. They are a positive achievement, an explicit triumph. — Thomas Mann

What good would politics be, if it didn’t give everyone the opportunity to make moral compromises. — Thomas Mann

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. — Thomas Mann

To allow only the kind of art that the average man understands is the worst small-mindedness and the murder of mind and spirit. It is my conviction that the intellect can be certain that in doing what most disconcerts the crowd, in pursuing the most daring, unconventional advances and explorations, it will in some highly indirect fashion serve man - and in the long run, all men. — Thomas Mann

Life Lessons by Thomas Mann

1. Thomas Mann taught us to be open to new ideas and to embrace change, as he was constantly reinventing himself throughout his life.
2. He also showed us the importance of hard work and dedication, as he wrote many acclaimed works despite facing numerous obstacles.
3. Lastly, he taught us to never give up, as he persevered through difficult times and eventually achieved success in his career.