Thomas Mann quotes Born: 06/06/1875 Died: 08/12/1955 Country: germany

• It is a strange fact that freedom and equality, the two basic ideas of democracy, are to some extent contradictory. Logically considered, freedom and equality are mutually exclusive, just as society and the individual are mutually exclusive. (Thomas Mann) [strange/equality//democracy]
• Respectable means rich, and decent means poor. I should die if I heard my family called decent. (Thomas Mann) [family]
• War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace. (Thomas Mann) [war/]
• Speech is civilization itself. The word... preserves contact / it is silence which isolates. (Thomas Mann) [speech/silence]
• All interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life. (Thomas Mann) [interest/disease/death/interest]
• Time cools, time clarifies; no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours. (Thomas Mann) [time/time]
• A solitary, unused to speaking of what he sees and feels, has mental experiences which are at once more intense and less articulate than those of a gregarious man. (Thomas Mann) [more]
• Order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject. (Thomas Mann) [order]
• For to be poised against fatality, to meet adverse conditions gracefully, is more than simple endurance; it is an act of aggression, a positive triumph. (Thomas Mann) [more/aggression]
• Time has no divisions to mark its passage, there is never a thunder-storm or blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year. Even when a new century begins it is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols. (Thomas Mann) [time]
• A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth. (Thomas Mann) [truth/truth/truth]
• He who loves the more is the inferior and must suffer. (Thomas Mann) [more]
• Space, like time, engenders forgetfulness; but it does so by setting us bodily free from our surroundings and giving us back our primitive, unattached state. (Thomas Mann) [time/state]
• "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) [art/language/willpower/high]
• The only religious way to think of death is as part and parcel of life. (Thomas Mann) [think/death/life]
• Extraordinary creature! So close a friend, and yet so remote. (Thomas Mann)
• It is a strange fact that freedom and equality, the two basic ideas of democracy, are to some extent contradictory. Logically considered, freedom and equality are mutually exclusive, just as society and the individual are mutually exclusive. (Thomas Mann) [strange/equality//democracy]
• 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 precise name; they simply cannot pass each other, their mutual embarrassment is frightful to behold. (Thomas Mann) [meeting]
• Human reason needs only to will more strongly than fate, and she is fate. (Thomas Mann) [human/needs/willpower/more]
• If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it. (Thomas Mann) [find]
• 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) [music/nature]
• 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) [art/language/willpower/high]
• Opinions cannot survive if one has no chance to fight for them. (Thomas Mann) [chance/fight]
• Every reasonable human being should be a moderate Socialist. (Thomas Mann) [human/being/abstinence]
• What is uttered is finished and done with. (Thomas Mann)
• Order and simplification are the first steps towards the mastery of a subject. (Thomas Mann) [order]
• 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 skeptics, out of moral chaos, can the Absolute spring, the anointed Terror of which the time has need. (Thomas Mann) [chaos/absolute/time]
• You ask what is the use of classification, arrangement, systemization? I answer you: order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject-the actual enemy is the unknown. (Thomas Mann) [order]
• Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous- to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd. (Thomas Mann) [solitude/beauty/poetry/absurd]
• Speech is civilization itself. The word... preserves contact -- it is silence which isolates. (Thomas Mann) [speech/silence]
• A harmful truth is better than a useful lie. (Thomas Mann)

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