Thomas Mann: Trending quotes

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Thomas Mann: 318 quotes173 likes

“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

"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

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

“Speech is civilization itself. The word, even the most contradictory word, preserves contact — it is silence which isolates.”

Thomas Mann book The Magic Mountain

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

“It often happens that an old family, with traditions that are entirely practical, sober and bourgeois, undergoes in its declining days a kind of artistic transfiguration.”

Thomas Mann book Tristan

Source: Tristan (1902), Ch. 7

“How strange a vehicle it is, coming down unchanged from times of old romance, and so characteristically black, the way no other thing is black except a coffin — a vehicle evoking lawless adventures in the plashing stillness of night, and still more strongly evoking death itself, the bier, the dark obsequies, the last silent journey!”

Thomas Mann book Death in Venice

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

“Unhappy German nation, how do you like the Messianic role allotted to you, not by God, nor by destiny, but by a handful of perverted and bloody-minded men?”

Thomas Mann

"This War" (1939); also in Order of the Day (1942)

“He is no longer with me—by my orders—but then that is merel the carrying-out of an order, after all a kind of negative being-with-me, as he would say. As for any independent life which Bashan might lead without me during these hours—that is not to be thought of.”

Thomas Mann book A Man and His Dog

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

“The purifying, healing influence of literature, the dissipating of passions by knowledge and the written word, literature as the path to understanding, forgiveness and love, the redeeming might of the word, the literary spirit as the noblest manifestation of the spirit of man, the writer as perfected type, as saint.”

Thomas Mann book The Magic Mountain

Source: The Magic Mountain (1924), Ch. 7

“This music of yours. A manifestation of the highest energy — not at all abstract, but without an object, energy in a void, in pure ether — where else in the universe does such a thing appear? We Germans have taken over from philosophy the expression ‘in itself,’ we use it every day without much idea of the metaphysical. But here you have it, such music is energy itself, yet not as idea, rather in its actuality. I call your attention to the fact that is almost the definition of God. Imitatio Dei — I am surprised it is not forbidden.”

Thomas Mann book Doctor Faustus

Source: Doctor Faustus (1947), Ch. 9

“The positive thing about the sceptic is that he considers everything possible!”

Thomas Mann

Attributed as a statement of Mann in the 1920s in Chariots of the Gods? : Unsolved Mysteries of the Past (1969) by Erich von Däniken, as translated by Michael Heron

“The invention of printing and the Reformation are and remain the two outstanding services of central Europe to the cause of humanity.”

Thomas Mann book The Magic Mountain

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

“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.”

Thomas Mann book The Magic Mountain

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

“It is a pregnant complex, gleaming up from the unconscious, of mother-fixation, sexual desire, and fear.”

Thomas Mann

Suffering and Greatness of Richard Wagner (1933)

“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.”

Thomas Mann book The Magic Mountain

Source: The Magic Mountain (1924), Ch. 5

“Frau Stöhr … began to talk about how fascinating it was to cough…. Sneezing was much the same thing. You kept on wanting to sneeze until you simply couldn’t stand it any longer; you looked as if you were tipsy; you drew a couple of breaths, then out it came, and you forgot everything else in the bliss of the sensation. Sometimes the explosion repeated itself two or three times. That was the sort of pleasure life gave you free of charge.”

Thomas Mann book The Magic Mountain

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