Thomas Mann

Paul Thomas Mann (6 June 1875 – 12 August 1955) was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate, known for his series of highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and mid-length stories, noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual.

Found 18 thoughts of Thomas Mann

Thomas Mann

Respectable means rich, and decent means poor. I should die if I heard my family called decent.

Extraordinary creature! So close a friend, and yet so remote.

For to be poised against fatality, to meet adverse conditions gracefully, is more than simple endurance; it is an act of aggression, a positive triumph.

If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere. You even smell it.

It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.

All interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life.

Human reason needs only to will more strongly than fate, and she is fate.

Democracy is timelessly human, and timelessness always implies a certain amount of potential youthfulness.

Time cools, time clarifies; no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours.

A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

A solitary, unused to speaking of what he sees and feels, has mental experiences which are at once more intense and less articulate than those of a gregarious man.

War is a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.

He who loves the more is the inferior and must suffer.

I never can understand how anyone can not smoke it deprives a man of the best part of life. With a good cigar in his mouth a man is perfectly safe, nothing can touch him, literally.

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.

There is something suspicious about music, gentlemen. I insist that she is, by her nature, equivocal. I shall not be going too far in saying at once that she is politically suspect.

For the myth is the foundation of life; it is the timeless schema, the pious formula into which life flows when it reproduces its traits out of the unconscious.

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