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Thomas Mann: 318 quotes173 likes

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

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

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

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)

“Opinions cannot survive if one has no chance to fight for them.”

Thomas Mann book The Magic Mountain

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

“I, for one, have never in my life come across a perfectly healthy human being.”

Thomas Mann book The Magic Mountain

The psychoanalyst "Dr. Krokowski" in Ch. 1
The Magic Mountain (1924)

“This conflict between the powers of love and chastity … it ended apparently in the triumph of chastity. Love was suppressed, held in darkness and chains, by fear, conventionality, aversion, or a tremulous yearning to be pure…. But this triumph of chastity was only an apparent, a pyrrhic victory. It would break through the ban of chastity, it would emerge — if in a form so altered as to be unrecognizable.”

Thomas Mann book The Magic Mountain

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

“Wagner’s art is the most sensational self-portrayal and self-critique of German nature that it is possible to conceive.”

Thomas Mann

Suffering and Greatness of Richard Wagner (1933)