Top 200 Thomas Mann Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”

— Thomas Mann

Featured in: Quotes About Writing

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

— Thomas Mann

Featured in: Firsts Quotes, Simplicity Quotes

3. “Everything is politics.”

— Thomas Mann

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

— Thomas Mann

5. “Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.”

— Thomas Mann

6. “Laughter is a sunbeam of the soul.”

— Thomas Mann

7. “A harmful truth is better than a useful lie.”

— Thomas Mann

8. “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

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

— Thomas Mann

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

— Thomas Mann

11. “It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.”

— Thomas Mann

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

— Thomas Mann

13. “A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth.”

— Thomas Mann

14. “Order and simplification are the first steps toward mastery of a subject – the actual enemy is the unknown.”

— Thomas Mann

15. “Speech is civilization itself.”

— Thomas Mann

16. “There are so many different kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst.”

— Thomas Mann

17. “This 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.”

— Thomas Mann

18. “He who loves the more is the inferior and must suffer.”

— Thomas Mann

19. “In books we never find anything but ourselves. Strangely enough, that always gives us great pleasure, and we say the author is a genius.”

— Thomas Mann

20. “We don’t love qualities, we love persons; sometimes by reason of their defects as well as of their qualities.”

— Thomas Mann

21. “Yes, they are carnal, both of them, love and death, and therein lies their terror and their great magic!”

— Thomas Mann

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

— Thomas Mann

23. “Thought that can merge wholly into feeling, feeling that can merge wholly into thought – these are the artist’s highest joy.”

— Thomas Mann

24. “Love is always simply itself, both as a subtle affirmation of life and as the highest passion; love is our sympathy with organic life, the touchingly lustful embrace of what is destined to decay –.”

— Thomas Mann

25. “Distance in a straight line has no mystery. The mystery is in the sphere.”

— Thomas Mann

26. “A man’s dying is more his survivor’s affair than his own.”

— Thomas Mann

27. “Io sto tra due mondi, di cui nessuno e’ il mio, e per questo la mia vita e’ un po’ difficile.”

— Thomas Mann

28. “Dr. Krokowski answered his own question, and said: “In the form of illness. Symptoms of disease are nothing but a disguised manifestation of the power of love; and all disease is only love transformed.”

— Thomas Mann

29. “We do not fear being called meticulous, inclining as we do to the view that only the exhaustive can be truly interesting.”

— Thomas Mann

30. “Forbearance in the face of fate, beauty constant under torture, are not merely passive. They are a positive achievement, an explicit triumph.”

— Thomas Mann

31. “There is only one real misfortune: to forfeit one’s own good opinion of oneself. Lose your complacency, once betray your own self-contempt and the world will unhesitatingly endorse it.”

— Thomas Mann

32. “Every reasonable human being should be a moderate Socialist.”

— Thomas Mann

33. “It is remarkable how a man cannot summarize his thoughts in even the most general sort of way without betraying himself completely, without putting his whole self into it, quite unawares, presenting as if in allegory the basic themes and problems of his life.”

— Thomas Mann

34. “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

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

— Thomas Mann

36. “And he spoke now about the “Word”, about the cult of the Word, about eloquence, which he called the triumph of humanity. Because the Word was the glory of humankind, and it alone gave dignity to life. Not just humanism, but humanity itself, man’s dignity and self-respect – they were inseparable from the Word, from literature.”

— Thomas Mann

37. “And both together, love-worthy and life-worthy, made up the true nobility.”

— Thomas Mann

38. “Speech is civilization itself. The word, even the most contradictory word, preserves contact – it is silence which isolates.”

— Thomas Mann

39. “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

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

— Thomas Mann

41. “All interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life.”

— Thomas Mann

42. “Often I have thought of the day when I gazed for the first time at the sea. The sea is vast, the sea is wide, my eyes roved far and wide and longed to be free. But there was the horizon. Why a horizon, when I wanted the infinite from life?”

— Thomas Mann

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

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

— Thomas Mann

44. “Art is the funnel, as it were, through which spirit is poured into life.”

— Thomas Mann

45. “Deep is the well of the past. Should we not call it bottomless?”

— Thomas Mann

46. “Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportianate, the absurd and the forbidden.”

— Thomas Mann

47. “It was the smile of Narcissus bending over the water mirror, the deep, enchanted, protracted smile with which he stretched out his arms to the reflection of his own beauty, an ever so slightly contorted smile – contorted by the hopelessness of his endeavor to kiss the lovely lips of his shadow – and coquettish, inquisitive and mildly pained, beguiled and beguiling.”

— Thomas Mann

48. “No man remains quite what he was when he recognizes himself.”

— Thomas Mann

49. “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

50. “He took in the squeaky music, the vulgar and pining melodies, because passion immobilizes good taste and seriously considers what soberly would be thought of as funny and to be resented.”

— Thomas Mann

Featured in: Romance Quotes