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Thomas Mann Quotes

Powerful Thomas Mann for Daily Growth

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

Equality, Some, Extent, Contradictory

What we call National-Socialism is the poisonous perversion of ideas which have a long history in German intellectual life.

- Thomas Mann

Which, German, Perversion, Poisonous

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

- Thomas Mann

Broke, German, Barbarism, Romanticism

For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts.

- Thomas Mann

Love, Thoughts, Over, Sovereignty

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

Beginning, Passage, Bells, Mortals

But my deepest and most secret love belongs to the fair-haired and the blue-eyed, the bright children of life, the happy, the charming and the ordinary.

- Thomas Mann

Love, Happy, Bright, Blue-Eyed

For the myth is the foundation of life; it is the timeless schema, the pious formula into which life flows when it reproduces its traits out of the unconscious.

- Thomas Mann

Unconscious, Which, Traits, Pious

Culture and possessions, there is the bourgeoisie for you.

- Thomas Mann

Culture, You, Possessions, Bourgeoisie

What is uttered is finished and done with.

- Thomas Mann

Done, Finished, Uttered

What a wonderful phenomenon it is, carefully considered, when the human eye, that jewel of organic structures, concentrates its moist brilliance on another human creature!

- Thomas Mann

Jewel, Carefully, Considered, Human Eye

A harmful truth is better than a useful lie.

- Thomas Mann

Truth, Better, Than, Harmful

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, Feels, Which, Articulate

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

Beauty, Tell, Keeping, Tread

People's behavior makes sense if you think about it in terms of their goals, needs, and motives.

- Thomas Mann

Think, Needs, Makes, Goals

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

Part, Perfectly, Literally, Best Part

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

Triumph, Against, Poised, Adverse Conditions

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.

- Thomas Mann

Stupid, Always, Making, Refined

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

- Thomas Mann

Stupid, Making, Perfectly, Refined

A man's dying is more his survivor's affair than his own.

- Thomas Mann

Dying, More, His, Affair

Time cools, time clarifies; no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours.

- Thomas Mann

Mood, Through, Hours, Maintained

Has the world ever been changed by anything save the thought and its magic vehicle the Word?

- Thomas Mann

Magic, Been, Ever, Changed

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

Beauty, Birth, Original, Solitude

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

The Most Important, Built, Freer

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

Nature, Going, About, Suspect

One must die to life in order to be utterly a creator.

- Thomas Mann

Die, Creator, Utterly, Order

Order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject.

- Thomas Mann

Steps, Toward, Subject, Order

If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it.

- Thomas Mann

Find, Idea, Even, Expressed

Democracy is timelessly human, and timelessness always implies a certain amount of potential youthfulness.

- Thomas Mann

Always, Amount, Timelessness, Implies

I love and reverence the Word, the bearer of the spirit, the tool and gleaming ploughshare of progress.

- Thomas Mann

Love, Reverence, I Love, Tool

War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.

- Thomas Mann

Peace, War, Cowardly, Escape

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