Thomas Mann Quotes

Often, the outward and visible material signs and symbols of happiness and success only show themselves when the process of decline has already set in. The outer manifestations take time - like the light of that star up there, which may in reality be already quenched, when it looks to us to be shining its brightest.

Gustav Aschenbach was the writer who spoke for all those who work on the brink of exhaustion, who labor and are heavy-laden, who are worn out already but still stand upright, all those moralists of achievement who are slight of stature and scanty of resources, but who yet, by some ecstasy of the will and by wise husbandry, manage at least for a time to force their work into a semblance of greatness.

Even as it applies to the individual, art is a heightened mode of existence. It gives deeper pleasures, it consumes more quickly. It carves upon the faces of its votaries the marks of imaginary and spiritual adventures; and though their external existence may be as quiet as a monk’s,

Ako je lutao, bilo je to zato, što za neke ljude uopšte nema pravog puta.
Kad bi ga pitali, šta zapravo kani postati, davao bi različite odgovore, jer je običavao reći ( a bio je to već i napisao), da nosi u sebi mogućnosti za hiljadu načina života, zajedno s potajnom svesti, da su to zapravo same nemogućnosti.

Human reason needs only to will more strongly than fate, and she is fate.

"There is a great deal of illusion in a work of art; one could go farther and say that it is illusory in and of itself, as a "work." Its ambition is to make others believe that it was not made but rather simply arose, burst forth from Jupiter's head like Pallas Athena fully adorned in enchased armor. But that is only a pretense. No work has ever come into being that way. It is indeed work, artistic labor for the purpose of illusion-and now the question arises whether, given the current state of our consciousness, our comprehension, and our sense of truth, the game is still permissible, still intellectually possible, can still be taken seriously; whether the work as such, as a self-sufficient and harmonically self-contained structure, still stands in a legitimate relation to our problematical social condition, with its total insecurity and lack of harmony; whether all illusion, even the most beautiful, and especially the most beautiful, has not become a lie today."

The only religious way to think of death is as part and parcel of life; to regard it, with the understanding and the emotions, as the inviolable condition of life.

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.

In the Word is involved the unity of humanity, the wholeness of the human problem, which permits nobody to separate the intellectual and artistic from the political and social, and to isolate himself within the ivory tower of the "cultural" proper.

For an important intellectual product to be immediately weighty, a deep relationship or concordance has to exist between the life of its creator and the general lives of the people. These people are generally unaware why exactly they praise a certain work of art. Far from being truly knowledgeable, they perceive it to have a hundred different benefits to justify their adulation; but the real underlying reason for their behavior cannot be measured, is sympathy.

Frau Stöhr ... began to talk about how fascinating it was to cough.... Sneezing was much the same thing. You kept on wanting to sneeze until you simply couldn't stand it any longer; you looked as if you were tipsy; you drew a couple of breaths, then out it came, and you forgot everything else in the bliss of the sensation. Sometimes the explosion repeated itself two or three times. That was the sort of pleasure life gave you free of charge.

Reduced to a miserable mass level, the level of a Hitler, German Romanticism broke out into hysterical barbarism.

A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

...nearly everything great owes its existence to “despites”: despite misery and affliction, poverty, desolation, physical debility, vice, passion, and a thousand other obstacles.

Durch die Gitterfenster seiner Individualität starrt der Mensch hoffnungslos auf die Ringmauern der äußeren Umstände, bis der Tod kommt und ihn zu Heimkehr und Freiheit ruft …

Individualität!… Ach, was man ist, kann und hat, scheint arm, grau, unzulänglich und langweilig; was man aber nicht ist, nicht kann und nicht hat, das eben ist es, worauf man mit jenem sehnsüchtigen Neide blickt, der zur Liebe wird, weil er sich fürchtet, zum Haß zu werden.

Ich trage den Keim, den Ansatz, die Möglichkeit zu allen Befähigungen und Betätigungen der Welt in mir … Wo könnte ich sein, wenn ich nicht hier wäre! Wer, was, wie könnte ich sein, wenn ich nicht ich wäre, wenn diese meine persönliche Erscheinung mich nicht abschlösse und mein Bewußtsein von dem aller derer trennte, die nicht ich sind! Organismus! Blinde, unbedachte, bedauerliche Eruption des drängenden Willens! Besser, wahrhaftig, dieser Wille webt frei in raum- und zeitloser Nacht, als daß er in einem Kerker schmachtet, der von dem zitternden und wankenden Flämmchen des Intellektes notdürftig erhellt wird!