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@xy, member from Sept. 25, 2023

Favourite quotes (21448)

“But he would “stay the course” — it was his favorite motto.”

The disposition of the main character "Gustav Aschenbach", Ch. 2, as translated by David Luke
Death in Venice (1912)

“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) German novelist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate

Quoted in Survey of Contemporary Literature (1977) by Frank Northen Magill, p. 4263

“Reduced to a miserable mass level, the level of a Hitler, German Romanticism broke out into hysterical barbarism.”

Thomas Mann Germany and the Germans

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

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

Thomas Mann book A Man and His Dog

Herr und Hund (A Man and his Dog) (1918)

“Psycho-analyses — how disgusting.”

Thomas Mann book The Magic Mountain

"Hans Castorp" in Ch. 1
The Magic Mountain (1924)

“My aversion from music rests on political grounds.”

Thomas Mann book The Magic Mountain

Source: The Magic Mountain (1924), Ch. 4

“One always has the idea of a stupid man as perfectly healthy and ordinary, and of illness as making one refined and clever and unusual.”

Thomas Mann book The Magic Mountain

Source: The Magic Mountain (1924), Ch. 4

“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) German novelist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate

Cited in Awake! magazine, 1995, 8/22; article: The Evils of Nazism Exposed.
In 1933, The Golden Age carried the first of many reports of the existence of concentration camps in Germany. In 1938, Jehovah’s Witnesses published the book Crusade Against Christianity, in French, German, and Polish. It carefully documented the vicious Nazi attacks on the Witnesses and included diagrams of the Sachsenhausen and Esterwegen concentration camps.

“Latin phrase meaning "It pleases to experiment", Ch. 4”
Placet experiri

Thomas Mann book The Magic Mountain

The Magic Mountain (1924)

“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 book Death in Venice

Source: Death in Venice (1912), Ch. 3, as translated by David Luke

“There is both rhyme and reason in what I say, I have made a dream poem of humanity. I will cling to it. I will be good. I will let death have no mastery over my thoughts. For therein lies goodness and love of humankind, and in nothing else.”

Thomas Mann book The Magic Mountain

Source: The Magic Mountain (1924), Ch. 6; variant translation: I will let death have no mastery over my thoughts! For therein, and in nothing else, lies goodness and love of humankind.

“I must tell you that we artists cannot tread the path of Beauty without Eros keeping company with us and appointing himself as our guide.”

Thomas Mann book Death in Venice

Source: Death in Venice (1912), Ch. 5, as translated by David Luke

“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 book Death in Venice

Source: Death in Venice (1912), Ch. 2, as translated by David Luke

“The intellect longs for the delights of the non-intellect, that which is alive and beautiful dans sa stupidité.”

Thomas Mann book Confessions of Felix Krull

Madame Houpflé, Bk. 2, Ch. 9
Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man (1954)

“Two principles, according to the Settembrinian cosmogony, were in perpetual conflict for possession of the world: force and justice, tyranny and freedom, superstition and knowledge; the law of permanence and the law of change, of ceaseless fermentation issuing in progress.”

Thomas Mann book The Magic Mountain

Source: The Magic Mountain (1924), Ch. 4

“What a glorious gift is imagination, and what satisfaction it affords!”

Thomas Mann book Confessions of Felix Krull

Bk. 1, Ch. 2
Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man (1954)

“What they, in their innocence, cannot comprehend is that a properly constituted, healthy, decent man never writes, acts, or composes.”

Thomas Mann book Tonio Kröger

"Tonio Kröger" on general opinions about artists.
Tonio Kröger (1903)

“I met the New Passion, then, as democracy, as political enlightenment and the humanitarianism of happiness. I understood its efforts to be toward the politicization of everything ethos; its aggressiveness and doctrinary intolerance consisted – I experienced them personally – in its denial and slander of every nonpolitical ethos. “Mankind” as humanitarian internationalism; “reason” and “virtue” as the radical republic; intellect as a thing between a Jacobin club and Freemasonry; art as social literature and maliciously seductive rhetoric in the service of social “desirability”; here we have the New Passion in its purest political form as I saw it close up. I admit that this is a special, extremely romanticized form of it.”

Thomas Mann (1875–1955) German novelist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate

Reflections of a Non-Political Man http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/sub_document.cfm?document_id=946 [Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen] (1918)

“He was all for catharsis and purification, he dreamed of an aesthetic consecration that should cleanse society of luxury, the greed of gold and all unloveliness.”

Thomas Mann (1875–1955) German novelist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate

Suffering and Greatness of Richard Wagner (1933)

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

Thomas Mann book Tonio Kröger

Variant translation: It is strange. If an idea gains control of you, you will find it expressed everywhere, you will actually smell it in the wind.
As translated by Bayard Quincy Morgan
Tonio Kröger (1903)