Top 200 Thomas Mann Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “It might well be that getting used to things up here was simply a matter of getting used to not getting used to them – but.”

— Thomas Mann

52. “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

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

— Thomas Mann

54. “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

55. “He probably was mediocre after all, though in a very honorable sense of that word.”

— Thomas Mann

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

— Thomas Mann

57. “Technology and comfort – having those, people speak of culture, but do not have it.”

— Thomas Mann

58. “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

59. “Innate in nearly every artistic nature is a wanton, treacherous penchant for accepting injustice when it creates beauty and showing sympathy for and paying homage to aristocratic privilege.”

— Thomas Mann

60. “Hans Castorp was, for his own person, quite without arrogance; yet a larger arrogance, the pride of caste and tradition, stood written on his brow and in his sleepy-looking eyes, and voiced itself in the conviction of his own superiority, which came over him when he measured Frau Chauchat for what she was.”

— Thomas Mann

61. “Is not life in itself a thing of goodness, irrespective of whether the course it takes for us can be called a ‘happy’ one?”

— Thomas Mann

62. “I don’t think anyone is thinking long-term now.”

— Thomas Mann

63. “I tell them that if they will occupy themselves with the study of mathematics they will find in it the best remedy against the lusts of the flesh.”

— Thomas Mann

64. “In Kant and Nietzsche we have the moralists of German militarism.”

— Thomas Mann

65. “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

66. “Music awakens time, awakens us to our finest enjoyment of time.”

— Thomas Mann

67. “It is most certainly a good thing that the world knows only the beautiful opus but not its origins, not the conditions of its creation; for if people knew the sources of the artist’s inspiration, that knowledge would often confuse them, alarm them, and thereby destroy the effects of excellence. strange hours! strangely enervating labor! bizarrely fertile intercourse of the mind with a body!”

— Thomas Mann

68. “His yearning for new and faraway places, his desire for freedom, relief and oblivion was as he admitted to himself, an urge to flee-an urge to get away from his work, from the everyday site of a cold, rigid, and passionate servitude.”

— Thomas Mann

69. “He thought what a fine thing it was that people made music all over the world, even in the strangest settings – probably even on polar expeditions.”

— Thomas Mann

70. “I shall need to sleep three weeks on end to get rested from the rest I’ve had.”

— Thomas Mann

71. “Only love, and not reason, yields kind thoughts.”

— Thomas Mann

72. “It’s hard to keep going when it seems like you’re not getting anywhere, but you’ll never succeed if you stop. Those of us with a dream that seems so far from being realized must remember that the road is long, but only those who stay on the path will reach their destination.”

— Thomas Mann

73. “Animals do not admire each other. A horse does not admire its companion.”

— Thomas Mann

74. “Time drowns in the unmeasured monotony of space. Where uniformity reigns, movement from point to point is no longer movement; and where movement is no longer movement, there is no time.”

— Thomas Mann

75. “Nothing is more curious and awkward than the relationship of two people who only know each other with their eyes – who meet and observe each other daily, even hourly and who keep up the impression of disinterest either because of morals or because of a mental abnormality. Between them there is listlessness and pent-up curiosity, the hysteria of an unsatisfied, unnaturally suppressed need for communion and also a kind of tense respect. Because man loves and honors man as long as he is not able to judge him, and desire is a product of lacking knowledge.”

— Thomas Mann

76. “There had always been people who had willingly entered into illness and madness in order to win knowledge for mankind – and knowledge, having been wrested from madness, became health and, once obtained by heroic sacrifice. its possession and use were no longer conditioned by illness and madness. That was the true death on the cross.”

— Thomas Mann

77. “Space, like time, gives birth to forgetfulness, but does so by removing an individual from all relationships and placing him in a free and pristine state – indeed, in but a moment it can turn a pedant and philistine into something like a vagabond. Time, they say, is water from the river Lethe, but alien air is a similar drink; and if its effects are less profound, it works all the more quickly.”

— Thomas Mann

78. “Yes, like watching someone flog a dead horse into obedience,” Settembrini scoffed; to which Naphta replied that since for our sin God had visited our bodies with the gruesome ignominy of rot and decay, there was no indignity in the same body’s receiving an occasional beating – which immediately brought them to the topic of cremation.”

— Thomas Mann

79. “What pleases the public is lively and vivid delineation which makes no demands on the intellect; but passionate and absolutist youth can only be enthralled by a problem.”

— Thomas Mann

80. “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

81. “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

82. “But Hans Castorp said as they walked on: “You see, I didn’t mind it at all, I got on with her quite well; I always do with such people; I understand instinctively how to go at them – don’t you think so? I even think, on the whole, I get on better with sad people than with jolly ones – goodness knows why. Perhaps it’s because I’m an orphan, and lost my parents early;.”

— Thomas Mann

83. “I have always been an admirer, I regard the gift of admiration as indispensable if one is to amount to something; I don’t know where I would be without it.”

— Thomas Mann

84. “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 skepsis, out of moral chaos, can the Absolute spring, the anointed Terror of which the time has need.”

— Thomas Mann

85. “Era la sonrisa de Narciso al inclinarse sobre el agua.”

— Thomas Mann

86. “Only incorrigible bohemians find it boring or laughable when a man of talent outgrows the libertine chrysalis stage and begins to perceive and express the dignity of the intellect, adopting the courtly ways of a solitude replete with bitter suffering and inner battles though eventually gaining a position of power and honor among men.”

— Thomas Mann

87. “Art, in its will to live and progress, puts on the mask of these dull-hearted personal traits in order to manifest, objectivize, and fulfill itself in them.”

— Thomas Mann

88. “At thirty a man steps out of the darkness and wasteland of preparation into active life it is the time to show oneself, the time of fulfillment.”

— Thomas Mann

89. “For happiness, he told himself, isn’t being loved; that was just a slightly nauseous satisfaction of vanity. Happiness is loving and perhaps seizing a few short illusory moments of intimacy with the object of one’s love.”

— Thomas Mann

90. “Inborn in almost every artistic nature is a luxuriant, treacherous bias in favor of the injustice that creates beauty, a tendency to sympathize with aristocratic preference and pay it homage. A.”

— Thomas Mann

91. “Democracy is eternal and human. It dignifies the human being; it respects humanity.”

— Thomas Mann

92. “And for its part, what was life? Was it perhaps only an infectious disease of matter – just as the so-called spontaneous generation of matter was perhaps only an illness, a cancerous stimulation of the immaterial?”

— Thomas Mann

93. “What good would politics be, if it didn’t give everyone the opportunity to make moral compromises.”

— Thomas Mann

94. “He may have been waiting a long while, in snow or rain, yet his joy at my final appearance knows no resentment at my faithlessness, though I have neglected him all day and brought his hopes to naught.”

— Thomas Mann

95. “Begin all over again? It would be no good. It would all turn out the same – all happen again just as it has happened. For certain people are For certain people are bound to go astray because for them no such thing as a right way exists.”

— Thomas Mann

96. “We are most likely to get angry and excited in our opposition to some idea when we ourselves are not quite certain of our own position, and are inwardly tempted to take the other side.”

— Thomas Mann

97. “There are people with whom it is not easy to live, but whom it is impossible to leave.”

— Thomas Mann

98. “But he immediately felt he did not really want to take that step. It would lead him back, give his soul back to himself; but when one is frantic, the last thing one desires is to be oneself again.”

— Thomas Mann

99. “Like any lover, he desired to please; suffered agonies at the thought of failure.”

— Thomas Mann

100. “The fruit of solitude is originality, something daringly and disconcertingly beautiful, the poetic creation. But the fruit of solitude can also be the perverse, the disproportionate, the absurd and the forbidden.”

— Thomas Mann