Thomas Mann Quotes

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

I think of my suffering, of the problem of my suffering. What am I suffering from? From knowledge — is it going to destroy me? What am I suffering from? From sexuality — is it going to destroy me? How I hate it, this knowledge which forces even art to join it! How I hate it, this sensuality, which claims everything fine and good is its consequence and effect. Alas, it is the poison that lurks in everything fine and good! — How am I to free myself of knowledge? By religion? How am I to free myself of sexuality? By eating rice?

A man's dying is more the survivors' affair than his own.

... a secret and ardent stirring within the frozen chastity of the universal.

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?

But he would “stay the course” — it was his favorite motto.

I stand between two worlds, am at home in neither, and in consequence have rather a hard time of it. You artists call me a commoner, and commoners feel tempted to arrest me ... I do not know which wounds me more bitterly. Commoners are stupid; but you worshippers of beauty who call me phlegmatic and without yearning, ought to reflect that there is an artistry so deep, so primordial and elemental, that no yearning seems to it sweeter and more worthy of tasting than that for the raptures of common-placeness.

Wahrscheinlich kann man vom Nichtwollen seelisch nicht leben; eine Sache nicht tun wollen, das ist auf Dauer kein Lebensinhalt.

There were profound reasons for his attachment to the sea: he loved it because as a hard-working artist he needed rest, needed to escape from the demanding complexity of phenomena and lie hidden on the bosom of the simple and tremendous; because of a forbidden longing deep within him that ran quite contrary to his life's task and was for that very reason seductive, a longing for the unarticulated and immeasurable, for eternity, for nothingness. To rest in the arms of perfection is the desire of any man intent upon creating excellence; and is not nothingness a form of perfection?

And then he'd rub his cheeks with cold cream because he'd just shaved and the tears stung.

The perishableness of life...imparts value, dignity, interest to life.

What they, in their innocence, cannot comprehend is that a properly constituted, healthy, decent man never writes, acts, or composes.

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

Deep is the well of the past. Should we not call it bottomless?

But Hans Castorp said as they walked on: “You see, I didn’t mind it at all, I got on with her quite well; I always do with such people; I understand instinctively how to go at them — don’t you think so? I even think, on the whole, I get on better with sad people than with jolly ones — goodness knows why. Perhaps it’s because I’m an orphan, and lost my parents early;