Our air up here is good for the disease — I mean good against the disease,... but it is also good for the disease. - Thomas Mann

I will keep faith with death in my heart, yet will remember that faith with death and the dead is only wickedness and dark voluptuousness and enmity against humankind, if it is given power over our thought and contemplation. For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts. And with that, I wake up.

Plato’s insistence that philosophers should rule the state would create a dangerous Utopia if it merely impled that the ruler should be a philosopher. The philosopher must also be a ruler — for that, primarily, creates the relationship of mind and life which we call democratic.

Hans Castorp had found courage up here — if courage before the elements is defined not as a dull, level-headed relationship with them, but a conscious abandonment to them.