Thomas Mann Quotes

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

It is probable that fascism will continue to prefer this kind of war to actual open warfare as long as possible, for a real war would soon reveal the important role which lies and deception play in the “totalitarian state.”

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.

Travelers prove their lack of education if they make fun of the customs and values of their hosts, and the qualities that do a person honour are many and varied.

"But admiration and sadness, admiration and worry, is not that almost a definition of love?"
"There are people with whom it is not easy to live, but whom it is impossible to leave."

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!

For at the moment of the final division, the final miniaturization of matter, suddenly the whole cosmos opened up.

Disease was a perverse, a dissolute form of life.

But he immediately felt he did not really want to take that step. It would lead him back, give his soul back to himself; but when one is frantic, the last thing one desires is to be oneself again.

Cruelty is one of the chief ingredients of love, and divided about equally between the sexes: cruelty of lust, ingratitude, callousness, maltreatment, domination. The same is true of the passive qualities, patience under suffering, even pleasure in ill usage.

For he used to say...that knowledge of the soul would unfailingly make us melancholy if the pleasures of expression did not keep us alert and of good cheer.

Passionate — that means to live for the sake of living. But one knows that you all live for sake of experience. Passion, that is self-forgetfulness. But what you all want is self-enrichment.

Even the piquant can forfeit popularity if tied to something intellectual.

It is not easy to speak on the coming victory of democracy at a moment when the aggressive brutality of fascism seems to be so distressingly triumphant.

C’è nostalgia, dentro, e malinconica invidia, appena un po’ di disprezzo e una grande, casta felicità.