xy

Asien verschlingt uns. Wohin man blickt: tatarische Gesichter.
Variant translation: Asia devours us. Wherever one looks: Tartar faces.
Settembrini in Ch. 5
The Magic Mountain (1924)

“The writer’s joy is the thought that can become emotion, the emotion that can wholly become a thought.”

Thomas Mann book Death in Venice

Source: Death in Venice (1912), Ch. 4, as translated by David Luke

“Never had he felt the joy of the word more sweetly, never had he known so clearly that Eros dwells in language.”

Thomas Mann book Death in Venice

Source: Death in Venice (1912), Ch. 4, as translated by David Luke

“What we call National-Socialism is the poisonous perversion of ideas which have a long history in German intellectual life.”

Thomas Mann The War and the Future

Speech, "The War and the Future" (1940); published in Order of the Day (1942)

“Only he who desires is amiable and not he who is satiated.”

Thomas Mann book Confessions of Felix Krull

Bk. 1, Ch. 8
Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man (1954)

“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) German novelist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate

"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

“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) German novelist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate

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

“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 book Tonio Kröger

Source: Tonio Kröger (1903), Ch. 8, as translated by David Luke

“A man’s dying is more the survivors’ affair than his own.”

Thomas Mann book The Magic Mountain

Source: The Magic Mountain (1924), Ch. 6

“The beautiful word begets the beautiful deed.”

Thomas Mann book The Magic Mountain

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