Thomas Mann Quotes

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

Solitude favors the original, the daringly and otherworldly beautiful, the poem. But it also favors the wrongful, the extreme, the absurd, and the forbidden.

He was simply not a “hero”, which is to say, he did not let his relationship with the man be determined by the woman.

Hans Castorp was, for his own person, quite without arrogance; yet a larger arrogance, the pride of caste and tradition, stood written on his brow and in his sleepy-looking eyes, and voiced itself in the conviction of his own superiority, which came over him when he measured Frau Chauchat for what she was.

However opinionated, perhaps even high-handed his presentations were, he was unquestionably an ingenious man — that was evident in the stimulating, thought-provoking effect his words had on a highly gifted young mind like Adri Leverkühn's. What had chiefly impressed him, as he revealed on the way home and the following day in the schoolyard, was the distinction Kretzschmar had made between cultic and cultural epochs and his observation that the secularization of art, its separation from worship, was of only a superficial and episodic nature. The high-school sophomore was manifestly moved by an idea that the lecturer had not even articulated, but that had caught fire in him:: that the separation of art from any liturgical context, its liberation and elevation to the isolated and personal, to culture for culture's sake, had burdened it with a solemnity without any point of reference, an absolute seriousness, a pathos of suffering epitomized in Beethoven's terrible appearance in the doorway — but that did not have to be its abiding destiny, its perpetual state of mind. Just listen to the young man! With almost no real, practical experience in the field of art, he was fantasizing in a void and in precocious words about art's apparently imminent retreat from its present-day role to a happier, more modest one in the service of a higher fellowship, which did not have to be, as at one time, the Church. What it would be, he could not say.

Protestantism harbors within it certain elements – just as the Great Reformer himself harbored such elements within his personality. I am thinking here of a sentimentality, a trancelike self-hypnosis that is not European, that is foreign and hostile to our active hemisphere’s law of life. Just look at him, this Luther. Look at the portraits, both as a young man and later. What a skull, what cheekbones, what a strange set to the eyes. My friend, that is Asia. I would be surprised, would be astonished, if Wendish-Slavic-Sarmatian blood was not at work there, and if it was not this massive phenomenon of a man – and who would deny him that – who proved to be a fatal weight placed on one of the two precariously balanced scales of your nation, on the Eastern scale, which caused – and still causes – the Western scale to fly heavenward.

A human being lives out not only his personal life as an individual, but also, consciously or subconsciously, the lives of his epoch and his contemporaries

There will always be men who are justified in this interest in themselves, this detailed observation of their own emotions; poets who can express with clarity and beauty their privileged inner life, and thereby enrich the emotional world of other people.

Il bene viene sempre troppo tardi, diventa realtà troppo tardi, quando non si è più capaci di goderne.

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

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.

He was empty within. There was no stimulus, no absorbing task into which he could throw himself. But his nervous activity, his inability to be quiet,.........had indeed taken the upper hand and become his master. It was something artificial, a pressure on the nerves, a depressant, in fact......This craving for activity had become a martyrdom, but it was dissipated in a host of trivialities.

Δεν υπάρχει τίποτε πιο παράξενο και πιο δύσκολο απ’ τη σχέση δύο ανθρώπων που γνωρίζονται μόνο με τα μάτια –που κάθε μέρα, κάθε ώρα, συναντά, παρατηρεί ο ένας τον άλλον, κι είναι ταυτόχρονα αναγκασμένοι κάτω από την πίεση της ευπρέπειας ή από κάποια δική τους παραξενιά να καμώνονται πως είναι αδιάφοροι και ξένοι μεταξύ τους, δίχως ένα χαιρετισμό ή μία λέξη. Ανάμεσά τους υπάρχει κάτι που αναστατώνει, που κεντρίζει την περιέργεια, μια υστερική επιθυμία, ανικανοποίητη και αφύσικα καταπιεσμένη, να γνωριστούν και να μιλήσουν, και προπαντός ένα είδος σεβασμού μαζί με αγωνία και ένταση. Γιατί ο άνθρωπος αγαπά και σέβεται τον άλλον όσο δεν τον ξέρει αρκετά καλά για να τον κρίνει, και η επιθυμία του είναι αποτέλεσμα ατελούς γνώσης.

"Miss von Osterloh had looked through it once during an idle fifteen minutes and pronunce it "quite sophisticated," which veredict was her euphemism for "inhumanly boring.

The average man thinks that a little falseness goes with beauty.