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Thomas Mann

144 quotes

“To place Russian communism on the same moral level with Nazi fascism, because both are totalitarian, is, at best, superficial, in the worse case it is fascism. He who insists on this equality may be a democrat; in truth and in his heart, he is already a fascist, and will surely fight fascism with insincerity and appearance, but with complete hatred only communism.”
Thomas Mann (1875–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Essays, ed. by H.Kurzke, Frankfurt 1986, vol. 2, p. 311
“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?”
Thomas Mann (1875–1955) first seen 1896 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter from Naples, Italy to Otto Grautoff (1896); as quoted in A Gorgon's Mask: The Mother in Thomas Mann's Fiction (2005) by Lewis A. Lawson, p. 34
“Here and there, among a thousand other peddlers, are slyly hissing dealers who urge you to come along with them to allegedly "very beautiful" girls, and not only to girls. They keep at it, walk alongside, praising their wares until you answer roughly. They don't know that you have resolved to eat nothing but rice just to escape from sexuality!”
Thomas Mann (1875–1955) first seen 1896 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter from Naples, Italy to Otto Grautoff (1896); as quoted in A Gorgon's Mask: The Mother in Thomas Mann's Fiction (2005) by Lewis A. Lawson, p. 35
“We are most likely to get angry and excited in our opposition to some idea when we ourselves are not quite certain of our own position, and are inwardly tempted to take the other side.”
Thomas Mann (1875–1955) first seen 1901 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Buddenbrooks [Buddenbrooks: Verfall einer Familie, Roman] (1901). Pt 8, Ch. 2
“Beauty can pierce one like pain.”
Thomas Mann (1875–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That daily the night falls; that over stresses and torments, cares and sorrows the blessing of sleep unfolds, stilling and quenching them; that every anew this draught of refreshment and lethe is offered to our parching lips, ever after the battle this mildness laves our shaking limbs, that from it, purified from sweat and dust and blood, strengthened, renewed, rejuvenated, almost innocent once more, almost with pristine courage and zeal we may go forth again — these I hold to be the benignest, the most moving of all the great facts of life.”
Thomas Mann (1875–1955) first seen 1909 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Sleep, Sweet Sleep" [Süßer Schlaf] first published in Neue Freie Presse [Vienna] (30 May 1909), as translated by Helen T. Knopf in Past Masters and Other Papers (1933), p. 269
“He is no longer with me—by my orders—but then that is merel the carrying-out of an order, after all a kind of negative being-with-me, as he would say. As for any independent life which Bashan might lead without me during these hours—that is not to be thought of.”
Thomas Mann (1875–1955) first seen 1918 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Herr und Hund (A Man and his Dog) (1918)
“Extraordinary creature! So close a friend, and yet so remote.”
Thomas Mann (1875–1955) first seen 1918 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Herr und Hund (A Man and his Dog) (1918)
“The meeting in the open of two dogs, strangers to each other, is one of the most painful, thrilling, and pregnant of all conceivable encounters; it is surrounded by an atmosphere of the last canniness, presided over by a constraint for which I have no preciser name; they simply cannot pass each other, their mutual embarrassment is frightful to behold.”
Thomas Mann (1875–1955) first seen 1918 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Herr und Hund (A Man and his Dog) (1918)
“A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth.”
Thomas Mann (1875–1955) first seen 1929 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Essay on Freud (16 May 1929)
“I have an epic, not a dramatic nature. My disposition and my desires call for peace to spin my thread, for a steady rhythm in life and art.”
Thomas Mann (1875–1955) first seen 1929 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Nobel Banquet Speech (10 December 1929)
“This fantastic state of mind, of a humanity that has outrun its ideas, is matched by a political scene in the grotesque style, with Salvation Army methods, hallelujahs and bell-ringing and dervishlike repetition of monotonous catchwords, until everybody foams at the mouth. Fanaticism turns into a means of salvation, enthusiasm into epileptic ecstasy, politics becomes an opiate for the masses, a proletarian eschatology; and reason veils her face.”
Thomas Mann (1875–1955) first seen 1930 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On German fascism, in "An Appeal to Reason" ["Deutsche Ansprache. Ein Appell an die Vernunft"] in Berliner Tageblatt (18 October 1930); as translated by Helen T. Lowe-Porter in Order of the Day, Political Essays and Spe…
“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.”
Thomas Mann (1875–1955) first seen 1936 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Responding to anti-semitic propaganda and to criticisms of German writers living in exile during the early years of the Nazi regime in Germany, as quoted in "Homage to Thomas Mann" in The New Republic (1 April 1936)
“In the Word is involved the unity of humanity, the wholeness of the human problem, which permits nobody to separate the intellectual and artistic from the political and social, and to isolate himself within the ivory tower of the "cultural" proper.”
Thomas Mann (1875–1955) first seen 1937 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to the dean of the Philosophical Faculty, Bonn University (January 1937)
“Democracy is timelessly human, and timelessness always implies a certain amount of potential youthfulness.”
Thomas Mann (1875–1955) first seen 1938 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Coming Victory of Democracy (1938), p. 14, translated by Agnes E. Meyer, Knopf (1938)
“In certain respects, particularly economically, National-Socialism is nothing but bolshevism. These two are hostile brothers of whom the younger has learned everything from the older, the Russian excepting only morality.”
Thomas Mann (1875–1955) first seen 1938 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Coming Victory of Democracy (1938), p. 14, translated by Agnes E. Meyer, Knopf (1938)
“This was love at first sight, love everlasting: a feeling unknown, unhoped for, unexpected — in so far as it could be a matter of conscious awareness; it took entire possession of him, and he understood, with joyous amazement, that this was for life.”
Thomas Mann (1875–1955) first seen 1939 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Early Sorrow" in Tellers of Tales : 100 Short Stories from the United States, England, France, Russia and Germany edited by William Somerset Maugham (1939), p. 884
“The Freudian theory is one of the most important foundation stones for an edifice to be built by future generations, the dwelling of a freer and wiser humanity.”
Thomas Mann (1875–1955) first seen 1939 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in The New York Times (21 June 1939)
“Unhappy German nation, how do you like the Messianic role allotted to you, not by God, nor by destiny, but by a handful of perverted and bloody-minded men?”
Thomas Mann (1875–1955) first seen 1939 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: This War" (1939); also in Order of the Day (1942)
“It is a strange fact that freedom and equality, the two basic ideas of democracy, are to some extent contradictory. Logically considered, freedom and equality are mutually exclusive, just as society and the individual are mutually exclusive.”
Thomas Mann (1875–1955) first seen 1940 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech, "The War and the Future" (1940); published in Order of the Day (1942)
“What we call National-Socialism is the poisonous perversion of ideas which have a long history in German intellectual life.”
Thomas Mann (1875–1955) first seen 1940 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech, "The War and the Future" (1940); published in Order of the Day (1942)
“An art whose medium is language will always show a high degree of critical creativeness, for speech is itself a critique of life: it names, it characterizes, it passes judgment, in that it creates.”
Thomas Mann (1875–1955) first seen 1929 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech at the Prussian Academy of Art in Berlin (22 January 1929); also in Essays of Three Decades (1942)
“A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”
Thomas Mann (1875–1955) first seen 1942 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Essays of Three Decades (1942)
“Politics has been called the “art of the possible,” and it actually is a realm akin to art insofar as, like art, it occupies a creatively mediating position between spirit and life, the idea and reality.”
Thomas Mann (1875–1955) first seen 1945 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech at the US Library of Congress (29 May 1945); published as "Germany and the Germans" ["Deutschland und die Deutschen"] in Die Neue Rundschau [Stockholm] (October 1945), p. 58, as translated by Helen T. Lowe-Porter
“Reduced to a miserable mass level, the level of a Hitler, German Romanticism broke out into hysterical barbarism.”
Thomas Mann (1875–1955) first seen 1945 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech at the US Library of Congress (29 May 1945); published as "Germany and the Germans" ["Deutschland und die Deutschen"] in Die Neue Rundschau [Stockholm] (October 1945), p. 58, as translated by Helen T. Lowe-Porter
“If Goethe claimed towards the end of his life that every reasonable person is a moderate Liberal, then in our time one must say: Every reasonable person is a moderate Socialist.”
Thomas Mann (1875–1955) first seen 1950 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in The New York Times (18 June 1950); also in Thomas Mann: A Critical Study (1971) by R. J. Hollingdale, Ch. 2
“I have always been an admirer. I regard the gift of admiration as indispensable if one is to amount to something; I don't know where I would be without it.”
Thomas Mann (1875–1955) first seen 1950 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter, (1950); as quoted in Thomas Mann — The Birth of Criticism (1987) by Marcel Reich-Ranicki
“War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.”
Thomas Mann (1875–1955) first seen 1954 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in This I Believe (1954), by Edward R. Murrow, p. 16
“It is not good when people no longer believe in war. Pretty soon they no longer believe in many other things which they absolutely must believe in if they are to be decent men.”
Thomas Mann (1875–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quoted in Survey of Contemporary Literature (1977) by Frank Northen Magill, p. 4263
“Only indifference is free. What is distinctive is never free, it is stamped with its own seal, conditioned and chained.”
Thomas Mann (1875–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in Sculpting in Time (1996), by Andrei Tarkovsky, p. 56
“I have read your book and its terrible documentation with deepest emotion. I cannot describe the mixed feeling of abhorrence and loathing which has filled my heart while perusing these records of human degradation and abominable cruelty. . . . To keep quiet would serve only the moral indifference of the world . . . You have done your duty in publishing this book and bringing these facts to light.”
Thomas Mann (1875–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Cited in Awake! magazine, 1995, 8/22; article: The Evils of Nazism Exposed.
“It often happens that an old family, with traditions that are entirely practical, sober and bourgeois, undergoes in its declining days a kind of artistic transfiguration.”
Thomas Mann (1875–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“They sang their mysterious duo, sang of their nameless hope, their death-in-love, their union unending, lost forever in the embrace of night's magic kingdom. O sweet night, everlasting night of love! Land of blessedness whose frontiers are infinite!”
Thomas Mann (1875–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It had been a moving, tranquil apotheosis, immersed in the transfiguring sunset glow of decline and decay and extinction. An old family, already grown too weary and too noble for life and action, had reached the end of its history, and its last utterances were sounds of music: a few violin notes, full of the sad insight which is ripeness for death.”
Thomas Mann (1875–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it.”
Thomas Mann (1875–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What they, in their innocence, cannot comprehend is that a properly constituted, healthy, decent man never writes, acts, or composes.”
Thomas Mann (1875–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This longing for the bliss of the commonplace.”
Thomas Mann (1875–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He remembered the dissolute adventures in which his senses, his nervous system and his mind had indulged; he saw himself corroded by irony and intellect, laid waste and paralyzed by insight, almost exhausted by the fevers and chills of creation, helplessly and contritely tossed to and fro between gross extremes, between saintly austerity and lust — oversophisticated and impoverished, worn out by cold, rare artificial ecstasies, lost, ravaged, racked and sick — and he sobbed with remorse and nostalgia.”
Thomas Mann (1875–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Thomas Mann (1875–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I admire the proud and cold who go adventuring on the paths of great and demoniac beauty, and scorn "man" — but I do not envy them. For if anything is capable of making a poet out of a man of letters, it is this plebeian love of mine for the human, living, and commonplace. All warmth, all goodness, all humor is born of it, and it almost seems to me as if it were that love itself, of which it is written that a man might speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and yet without it be no more than sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal.”
Thomas Mann (1875–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But he would “stay the course” — it was his favorite motto.”
Thomas Mann (1875–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Hidden away amongst Aschenbach's writing was a passage directly asserting that nearly all the great things that exist owe their existence to a defiant despite: it is despite grief and anguish, despite poverty, loneliness, bodily weakness, vice and passion and a thousand inhibitions, that they have come into being at all. But this was more than an observation, it was an experience, it was positively the formula of his life and his fame, the key to his work.”
Thomas Mann (1875–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The new hero-type favored by Aschenbach, and recurring in his books in a multiplicity of individual variants, had already been remarked upon at an early stage by a shrewd commentator, who had described his conception as that of “an intellectual and boyish manly virtue, that of a youth who clenches his teeth in proud shame and stands calmly on as the swords and spears pass through his body … the figure of Saint Sebastian is the most perfect symbol if not of art in general, then certainly of the kind of art in question.”
Thomas Mann (1875–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Gustav Aschenbach was the writer who spoke for all those who work on the brink of exhaustion, who labor and are heavy-laden, who are worn out already but still stand upright, all those moralists of achievement who are slight of stature and scanty of resources, but who yet, by some ecstasy of the will and by wise husbandry, manage at least for a time to force their work into a semblance of greatness.”
Thomas Mann (1875–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Was it an intellectual consequence of this ‘rebirth,’ of this new dignity and rigor, that, at about the same time, his sense of beauty was observed to undergo an almost excessive resurgence, that his style took on the noble purity, simplicity and symmetry that were to set upon all his subsequent works that so evident and evidently intentional stamp of the classical master.”
Thomas Mann (1875–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“How else is the famous short story ‘A study in Abjection’ to be understood but as an outbreak of disgust against an age indecently undermined by psychology.”
Thomas Mann (1875–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“How strange a vehicle it is, coming down unchanged from times of old romance, and so characteristically black, the way no other thing is black except a coffin — a vehicle evoking lawless adventures in the plashing stillness of night, and still more strongly evoking death itself, the bier, the dark obsequies, the last silent journey!”
Thomas Mann (1875–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“With astonishment Aschenbach noticed that the boy was entirely beautiful. His countenance, pale and gracefully reserved, was surrounded by ringlets of honey-colored hair, and with its straight nose, its enchanting mouth, its expression of sweet and divine gravity, it recalled Greek sculpture of the noblest period.”
Thomas Mann (1875–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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?”
Thomas Mann (1875–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The writer's joy is the thought that can become emotion, the emotion that can wholly become a thought.”
Thomas Mann (1875–1955) said by 1955 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source