Thomas Mann: Trending quotes

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Thomas Mann: 318   quotes 173   likes

“It is as though something had begun to slip – as though I haven’t the firm grip I had on events.”

What is success? It is an inner, an indescribable force, resourcefulness, power of vision; a consciousness that I am, by my mere existence, exerting pressure on the movement of life about me. It is my belief in the adaptability of life to my own ends. Fortune and success lie within ourselves. We must hold them firmly – deep within us. For as soon as something begins to slip, to relax, to get tired, within us, then everything without us will rebel and struggle to withdraw from our influence. One thing follows another, blow after blow – and the man is finished.
Buddenbrooks [Buddenbrooks: Verfall einer Familie, Roman] (1901). Pt 7, Ch. 6

“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.
Source: Tonio Kröger (1903), Ch. 9, as translated by Bayard Quincy Morgan

“A black pall, you know, with a silver cross on it, or R. I. P.”

requiescat in pace — you know. That seems to me the most beautiful expression — I like it much better than ‘He is a jolly good fellow,’ which is simply rowdy.
Source: The Magic Mountain (1924), Ch. 5

“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.”

As quoted in The New York Times (18 June 1950); also in Thomas Mann: A Critical Study (1971) by R. J. Hollingdale, Ch. 2

“Profundity must smile.”

Source: The Beloved Returns (1939), Ch. 7

“Everything is politics.”

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

“What we call mourning for our dead is perhaps not so much grief at not being able to call them back as it is grief at not being able to want to do so.”

Was wir Trauer nennen, ist vielleicht nicht sowohl der Schmerz über die Unmöglichkeit, unsere Toten ins Leben kehren zu sehen, als darüber, dies gar nicht wünschen zu können.
http://books.google.com/books?id=q4UdAAAAMAAJ&q=%22was+wir+Trauer+nennen+ist+vielleicht+nicht+sowohl+der+Schmerz+%C3%BCber+die+Unm%C3%B6glichkeit+unsere+Toten+ins+Leben+kehren+zu+sehen+als+dar%C3%BCber+dies+gar+nicht+w%C3%BCnschen+zu+k%C3%B6nnen%22&pg=PA562#v=onepage
Source: The Magic Mountain (1924), Ch. 7

“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)

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

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.”

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

“Psycho-analyses — how disgusting.”

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

“My aversion from music rests on political grounds.”

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.”

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.