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

Six months at most after they get here, these young people — and they are mostly young who come — have lost every idea they had, except flirtation and temperature.

The deep conviction . . . that nothing good for Germany or the world can come out of the present German regime, has made me avoid the country in whose spiritual tradition I am more deeply rooted than are those who for three years have been trying to find courage enough to declare before the world that I am not a German. And I feel to the bottom of my heart that I have done right in the eyes of my contemporaries and of posterity.

Profundity must smile.