Thomas Mann Quotes page 3

“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.”

Reflections of a Non-Political Man http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/sub_document.cfm?document_id=946 [Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen] (1918)

“What they, in their innocence, cannot comprehend is that a properly constituted, healthy, decent man never writes, acts, or composes.”

Suffering and Greatness of Richard Wagner (1933)

Thomas Mann book Tonio Kröger

"Tonio Kröger" on general opinions about artists.
Tonio Kröger (1903)

“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)

“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.”

“The intellect longs for the delights of the non-intellect, that which is alive and beautiful dans sa stupidité.”

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

Thomas Mann book Confessions of Felix Krull

Madame Houpflé, Bk. 2, Ch. 9
Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man (1954)

“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.”

“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.”

Source: Death in Venice (1912), Ch. 2, 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.”

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

“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.”

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.

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

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

“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.”

The Magic Mountain (1924)

“One always has the idea of a stupid man as perfectly healthy and ordinary, and of illness as making one refined and clever and unusual.”

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.

“My aversion from music rests on political grounds.”

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

“Psycho-analyses — how disgusting.”

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

“Extraordinary creature! So close a friend, and yet so remote.”

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

Thomas Mann book A Man and His Dog

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

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

Thomas Mann Germany and the Germans

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

“It is not good when people no longer believe in war. Pretty soon they no longer believe in many other things which they absolutely must believe in if they are to be decent men.”

“But he would “stay the course” — it was his favorite motto.”

Quoted in Survey of Contemporary Literature (1977) by Frank Northen Magill, p. 4263

“The meeting in the open of two dogs, strangers to each other, is one of the most painful, thrilling, and pregnant of all conceivable encounters; it is surrounded by an atmosphere of the last canniness, presided over by a constraint for which I have no preciser name; they simply cannot pass each other, their mutual embarrassment is frightful to behold.”

The disposition of the main character "Gustav Aschenbach", Ch. 2, as translated by David Luke
Death in Venice (1912)

Thomas Mann book A Man and His Dog

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

“Disease was a perverse, a dissolute form of life.”

“To place Russian communism on the same moral level with Nazi fascism, because both are totalitarian, is, at best, superficial, in the worse case it is fascism. He who insists on this equality may be a democrat; in truth and in his heart, he is already a fascist, and will surely fight fascism with insincerity and appearance, but with complete hatred only communism.”

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

“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.”

Essays, ed. by H.Kurzke, Frankfurt 1986, vol. 2, p. 311

“Everything is politics.”

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

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

“Profundity must smile.”

“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.”

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

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

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