I have always been an admirer. I regard the gift of admiration as indispensable if one is to amount to something; I dont know where I would be without it. – Thomas Mann
Extraordinary creature! So close a friend, and yet so remote. – Thomas Mann
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
A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth. – Thomas Mann
A harmful truth is better than a useful lie. – Thomas Mann
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
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
Everything is politics. – Thomas Mann
What we call National-Socialism is the poisonous perversion of ideas which have a long history in German intellectual life. – Thomas Mann
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
Respectable means rich, and decent means poor. I should die if I heard my family called decent. – 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
The only religious way to think of death is as part and parcel of life. – Thomas Mann
All interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life. – Thomas Mann
It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death. – Thomas Mann
For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts. – Thomas Mann
For 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. – Thomas Mann
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
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
War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace. – Thomas Mann
