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Thomas Mann Quotes
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Paul Thomas Mann was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and the 1929 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate. His highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and novellas are noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual. His analysis and critique of the European and German soul used modernized versions of German and Biblical stories, as well as the ideas of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Nietzsche and Arthur Schopenhauer.

Mann was a member of the Hanseatic Mann family and portrayed his family and class in his first novel, Buddenbrooks. His older brother was the radical writer Heinrich Mann and three of Mann's six children, Erika Mann, Klaus Mann and Golo Mann, also became significant German writers. When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, Mann fled to Switzerland. When World War II broke out in 1939, he moved to the United States, then returned to Switzerland in 1952. Mann is one of the best-known exponents of the so-called Exilliteratur, German literature written in exile by those who opposed the Hitler regime.

Mann's work influenced many later authors, including Heinrich Böll, Joseph Heller, Yukio Mishima. Wikipedia  

✵ 6. June 1875 – 12. August 1955  •  Other names Paul Thomas Mann
Thomas Mann photo
Thomas Mann: 159 quotes173 likes

Thomas Mann Quotes

“What was life? It was warmth, the warmth generated by a form-preserving instability, a fever of matter, which accompanied the process of ceaseless decay and repair of protein molecules that were too impossibly ingenious in structure.”

Thomas Mann book The Magic Mountain

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

“In effect it seemed to him that, though honor might possess certain advantages, yet shame had others, and not inferior: advantages, even, that were well-nigh boundless in their scope.”

Thomas Mann book The Magic Mountain

Source: The Magic Mountain (1924), Ch. 3

“The Freudian theory is one of the most important foundation stones for an edifice to be built by future generations, the dwelling of a freer and wiser humanity.”

Thomas Mann

As quoted in The New York Times (21 June 1939)

“A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.”

Thomas Mann book The Magic Mountain

Source: The Magic Mountain (1924), Ch. 2, “At Tienappels’,” (1924), trans. by H.T. Lowe-Porter (1928).

“A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth.”

Thomas Mann

Essay on Freud (16 May 1929)

“Gustav Aschenbach was the writer who spoke for all those who work on the brink of exhaustion, who labor and are heavy-laden, who are worn out already but still stand upright, all those moralists of achievement who are slight of stature and scanty of resources, but who yet, by some ecstasy of the will and by wise husbandry, manage at least for a time to force their work into a semblance of greatness.”

Thomas Mann book Death in Venice

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

“By the approach through abnormality we have succeeded in penetrating most deeply into the darkness of human nature … The literary person should be the last person to be surprised at this fact. Sooner might he be surprised that he, considering his strong generally and individual tendency, should have so late become aware of the close sympathetic relations which connected his own existence with psychoanalytic research and the life-work of Sigmund Freud. I realized this connection only at a time when his achievement was no longer thought of as merely a therapeutic method, whether recognized or disputed; when it had long since outgrown his purely medical implications and become a world movement which penetrated into every field of science and every domain of the intellect: literature, the history of art, religion and prehistory; mythology, folklore, pedagogy, and what not.”

Thomas Mann

Freud and the Future (1937)

“Beauty can pierce one like pain.”

Thomas Mann

Buddenbrooks [Buddenbrooks: Verfall einer Familie, Roman], Pt 11, Ch. 2

“In the Word is involved the unity of humanity, the wholeness of the human problem, which permits nobody to separate the intellectual and artistic from the political and social, and to isolate himself within the ivory tower of the "cultural" proper.”

Thomas Mann

Letter to the dean of the Philosophical Faculty, Bonn University (January 1937)

“The deep conviction... that nothing good for Germany or the world can come out of the present German regime, has made me avoid the country in whose spiritual tradition I am more deeply rooted than are those who for three years have been trying to find courage enough to declare before the world that I am not a German. And I feel to the bottom of my heart that I have done right in the eyes of my contemporaries and of posterity.”

Thomas Mann

Responding to anti-semitic propaganda and to criticisms of German writers living in exile during the early years of the Nazi regime in Germany, as quoted in "Homage to Thomas Mann" in The New Republic (1 April 1936) http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114269/thomas-mann-stands-anti-semitism-stacks

“Our air up here is good for the disease — I mean good against the disease,… but it is also good for the disease.”

Thomas Mann book The Magic Mountain

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

“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.”

Thomas Mann book Tonio Kröger

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

“We are most likely to get angry and excited in our opposition to some idea when we ourselves are not quite certain of our own position, and are inwardly tempted to take the other side.”

Thomas Mann

Buddenbrooks [Buddenbrooks: Verfall einer Familie, Roman] (1901). Pt 8, Ch. 2

“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

“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

“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)

“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

“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

“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

“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 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

“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)

“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)

“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

“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

“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

“The beautiful word begets the beautiful deed.”

Thomas Mann book The Magic Mountain

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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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)

“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)

“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

“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

“Asia surrounds us — wherever one’s glance rests, a Tartar physiognomy.”

Thomas Mann book The Magic Mountain

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)

“As a science of the unconscious it is a therapeutic method, in the grand style, a method overarching the individual case. Call this, if you choose, a poet’s utopia.”

Thomas Mann

Freud and the Future (1937)

“In certain respects, particularly economically, National-Socialism is nothing but bolshevism. These two are hostile brothers of whom the younger has learned everything from the older, the Russian excepting only morality.”

Thomas Mann book The Coming Victory of Democracy

The Coming Victory of Democracy (1938), p. 14, translated by Agnes E. Meyer, Knopf (1938)

“O scenes of the beautiful world! Never have you presented yourself to more appreciative eyes.”

Thomas Mann book Confessions of Felix Krull

Bk. 2, Ch. 4
Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man (1954)

“What a wonderful phenomenon it is, carefully considered, when the human eye, that jewel of organic structures, concentrates its moist brilliance on another human creature!”

Thomas Mann book Confessions of Felix Krull

Bk. 2, Ch. 4
Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man (1954)

“Only indifference is free. What is distinctive is never free, it is stamped with its own seal, conditioned and chained.”

Thomas Mann

As quoted in Sculpting in Time (1996), by Andrei Tarkovsky, p. 56

“This was Venice, the flattering and suspect beauty — this city, half fairy tale and half tourist trap, in whose insalubrious air the arts once rankly and voluptuously blossomed, where composers have been inspired to lulling tones of somniferous eroticism.”

Thomas Mann book Death in Venice

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

“An art whose medium is language will always show a high degree of critical creativeness, for speech is itself a critique of life: it names, it characterizes, it passes judgment, in that it creates.”

Thomas Mann

Speech at the Prussian Academy of Art in Berlin (22 January 1929); also in Essays of Three Decades (1942)

“How else is the famous short story ‘A study in Abjection’ to be understood but as an outbreak of disgust against an age indecently undermined by psychology.”

Thomas Mann book Death in Venice

On a short story of the character, "Gustav Aschenbach". Ch. 2, as translated by David Luke
Death in Venice (1912)

“I have always been an admirer. I regard the gift of admiration as indispensable if one is to amount to something; I don’t know where I would be without it.”

Thomas Mann

Letter, (1950); as quoted in Thomas Mann — The Birth of Criticism (1987) by Marcel Reich-Ranicki

“Beer, tobacco, and music,” he went on. “Behold the Fatherland.”

Thomas Mann book The Magic Mountain

"Herr Settembrini" commenting on Germany, in Ch. 4
The Magic Mountain (1924)

“They sang their mysterious duo, sang of their nameless hope, their death-in-love, their union unending, lost forever in the embrace of night’s magic kingdom. O sweet night, everlasting night of love! Land of blessedness whose frontiers are infinite!”

Thomas Mann book Tristan

Source: Tristan (1902), Ch. 8

“Six months at most after they get here, these young people — and they are mostly young who come — have lost every idea they had, except flirtation and temperature.”

Thomas Mann book The Magic Mountain

Settembrini on the Magic Mountain Society, in Ch. 5
The Magic Mountain (1924)

“Paradox is the poisonous flower of quietism, the iridescent surface of the rotting mind, the greatest depravity of all.”

Thomas Mann book The Magic Mountain

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