Thomas Mann: Quotes about life

Thomas Mann was German novelist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate. Explore interesting quotes on life.

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)

“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.”

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

“I never can understand how anyone can not smoke — it deprives a man of the best part of life … with a good cigar in his mouth a man is perfectly safe, nothing can touch him — literally.”

Thomas Mann book The Magic Mountain

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

“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)

“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

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

Thomas Mann book The Magic Mountain

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