Thomas Mann

When one day is like all the others, then they are all like one; complete uniformity would make the longest life seem short, and as though it had stolen away from us unawares.

A human being tends to believe that the mood of the moment, be it troubled or blithe, peaceful or stormy, is the true, native, and permanent tenor of his existence ... whereas the truth is that he is condemned to improvisation and morally lives from hand to mouth all the time.

A solitary, unused to speaking of what he sees and feels, has mental experiences which are at once

What the collectivist age wants, allows, and approves is the perpetual holiday from the self.

Disease makes men more physical, it leaves them nothing but body.

Knowledge of the soul would unfailingly make us melancholy if the pleasures of expression did not keep us alert and of good cheer.

The good Lord sees your heart, not the braid on your jacket, before Him we are all in our birthday suits, generals and common men alike.

The friend of humanity cannot recognize a distinction between what is political and what is not. There is nothing that is not political.

He whose preoccupation is with excellence longs fervently to find rest in perfection; and is not nothingness a form of perfection?

The past is immortalized; that is to say, it is dead; and death is the root of all godliness and all abiding significance.

The child of civilization, remote from wild nature and all her ways, is more susceptible to her grandeur than is her untutored son who has looked at her and lived close to her from childhood up, on terms of prosaic familiarity.

Music quickens time, she quickens us to the finest enjoyment of time.

What we call mourning for our dead is perhaps not so much grief at not being able to call them back as it is grief at not being able to want to do so.

Whatever profits man, that is the truth. In him all nature is comprehended, in all nature only he is created, and all nature only for him. He is the measure of all things, and his welfare is the sole and single criterion of truth.

Like any lover, he desired to please; suffered agonies at the thought of failure, and brightened his dress with smart ties and handkerchiefs and other youthful touches.

He who loves the more is the inferior and must suffer.

I his was love at first sight, love everlasting: a feeling unknown, unhoped for, unexpected—in so far as it could be a matter of conscious awareness; it took entire possession of him, and he understood, with joyous amazement, that this was for life.

In all humanism there is an element of weakness, which in some circumstances may be its ruin, connected with its contempt of fanaticism, its patience, its love of scepticism; in short, its natural goodness.

One ought to go to a funeral instead of to church when one feels the need of being uplifted. People have on good black clothes, and they take off their hats and look at the coffin, and behave serious and reverent, and nobody dares to make, a bad joke.

Desire projected itself visually: his fancy, not quite yet lulled since morning, imaged the marvels and terrors of the manifold earth.

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

A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.

A state of conscience is higher than a state of innocence.

Some of necessity go astray, because for them there is no such thing as a right path.

Never had he lost himself in a book as one does when that single work seems the most important in the world; unique, a little, all-embracing universe, into which one plunges and submerges oneself in order to draw nourishment out of every syllable.

And his heart was stirred, it felt a father’s kindness: such an emotion as the possessor of beauty can inspire in one who has offered himself up in spirit to create beauty.

There lay the little miracle among the pillows: so well formed, so encompassed, as it were, with the harmony of sweet proportions, with little hands that even then, though so much tinier, were beautiful as now; with wide-open eyes blue as the sky and brighter than the sunshine—and almost in that very second he felt himself captured and held fast.

There is a way of being an artist that goes so deep and is so much a matter of origins and destinies that no longing seems to it sweeter and more worth knowing than longing after the bliss of the commonplace.

Thought that can merge wholly into feeling, feeling that can merge wholly into thought—these are the artist’s highest joy.

It is a deep-lying patriarchal instinct in the dog which leads him—at least in the more manly, outdoor breeds—to recognize and honor in the man of the house and head of the family his absolute master and overlord, protector of the hearth; and to find in the relation of vassalage to him the basis and value of his own existence, whereas his attitude toward the rest of the family is much more independent.

If love is the best thing in life, then the best part of love is the kiss.

Every intellectual attitude is latently political.

The doctrine of thrift for the poor is dumb and cruel, like advising them to try and lift themselves by their bootstraps.

If you want a symbolic gesture, don't burn the flag wash it.

It is impossible for ideas to compete in the marketplace if no forum for their presentation is provided or available.

It is love, not reason that is stronger than death.