Source: The Magic Mountain (1924), Ch. 5
Quotes from book
The Magic Mountain
Thomas Mann
Original title
Der Zauberberg
(German, 1924)
The Magic Mountain is a novel by Thomas Mann, first published in German in November 1924. It is widely considered to be one of the most influential works of twentieth-century German literature.
Source: The Magic Mountain (1924), Ch. 4
Source: The Magic Mountain (1924), Ch. 5
“What good would politics be, if it didn’t give everyone the opportunity to make moral compromises.”
Source: The Magic Mountain
“All interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life.”
Source: The Magic Mountain (1924), Ch. 6
“He probably was mediocre after all, though in a very honorable sense of that word.”
Source: The Magic Mountain
“There are so many different kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst.”
Source: The Magic Mountain
“Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.”
Source: The Magic Mountain (1924), Ch. 6, section, A Good Soldier as translated by Woods (1996), p. 506
“It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.”
Variant: Love stands opposed to death. It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.
Source: The Magic Mountain (1924), Ch. 6; variant translation: It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death. Only love, not reason, gives sweet thoughts. And from love and sweetness alone can form come: form and civilization.
Context: Love stands opposed to death. It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death. Only love, not reason, gives kind thoughts.
“Time cools, time clarifies, no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours.”
Source: The Magic Mountain (1924), Ch. 7
Context: Time cools, time clarifies, no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours. In the early dawn, standing weapon in hand, neither of the combatants would be the same man as on the evening of the quarrel. They would be going through it, if at all, mechanically, in obedience to the demands of honour, not, as they would have at first, of their own free will, desire, and conviction; and such a denial of their actual selves in favour of their past ones, it must somehow be possible to prevent.
“Irony, forsooth! Guard yourself, Engineer, from the sort of irony that thrives up here”
Source: The Magic Mountain (1924), Ch. 5
Context: Irony, forsooth! Guard yourself, Engineer, from the sort of irony that thrives up here; guard yourself altogether from taking on their mental attitude! Where irony is not a direct and classic device of oratory, not for a moment equivocal to a healthy mind, it makes for depravity, it becomes a drawback to civilization, an unclean traffic with the forces of reaction, vice and materialism.
“Passionate — that means to live for the sake of living.”
The Magic Mountain (1924)
Context: Passionate — that means to live for the sake of living. But one knows that you all live for the sake of experience. Passion, that is self-forgetfulness. But what you all want is self-enrichment. C'est ça. You don't realize what revolting egoism it is, and that one day it will make you the enemies of the human race.
Source: The Magic Mountain (1924), Ch. 7
Context: We, when we sow the seeds of doubt deeper than the most up-to-date and modish free-thought has ever dreamed of doing, we well know what we are about. Only out of radical skepsis, out of moral chaos, can the Absolute spring, the anointed Terror of which the time has need.
“The body, love, death, these three are just one.”
Hans Castorp to Chauchat, in French, Ch. 5
The Magic Mountain (1924)
Context: Rough translation of this passage written in French: The body, love, death, these three are just one. For the body, this is the disease and exquisite delight, and this that does die, yes, they are carnal both of them, love and death, and thus their terror and their great magic!
