Top 200 Thomas Mann Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “The experience of death must ultimately be the experience of life, or else it is only a wraith.”

— Thomas Mann

102. “Travelers prove their lack of education if they make fun of the customs and values of their hosts, and the qualities that do a person honour are many and varied.”

— Thomas Mann

103. “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

104. “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

105. “To be young means to be original, to have remained nearer to the sources of life: it means to be able to stand up and shake off the fetters of an outlived civilization, to dare – where others lack the courage – to plunge again into the elemental.”

— Thomas Mann

106. “This old, folkish layer survives in us all, and to speak as I really think, I do not consider religion the most adequate means of keeping it under lock and key. For that, literature alone avails, humanistic science, the ideal of the free and beautiful human being.”

— Thomas Mann

107. “Miss von Osterloh had looked through it once during an idle fifteen minutes and pronunce it “quite sophisticated,” which veredict was her euphemism for “inhumanly boring.”

— Thomas Mann

108. “Strangely fruitful intercourse this, between one body and another mind.”

— Thomas Mann

109. “The past was only tolerable if one felt above it, instead of having to stare stupidly at it aware of one’s present impotence.”

— Thomas Mann

110. “She was not a woman; but she was not a man either and therefore not a human being. A solemn angel of daring with parted lips and dilated nostrils, that is what she was, an unapproachable Amazon of the realms of space beneath the canvas, high above the crowd, whose lust for her was transformed into awe.”

— Thomas Mann

111. “But he discovered that his thoughts and inspirations were like the intimations of a dream, which always seem inspired at the time but prove utterly shallow and useless to the waking mind.”

— Thomas Mann

112. “These artists pay little attention to an encircling present that bears no direct relation to the world of work in which they live, and they therefore see in it nothing more than an indifferent framework for life, either more or less favorable to production.”

— Thomas Mann

113. “I dreamed about the nature of man, and about a courteous, reasonable, and respectable community of men – while the ghastly bloody feast went on in the temple behind them. Were they courteous and charming to one another, those sunny folk, out of silent regard for that horror?”

— Thomas Mann

114. “Men do not know why they award fame to one work of art rather than another. Without being in the faintest connoisseurs, they think to justify the warmth of their commendations by discovering it in a hundred virtues, whereas the real ground of their applause is inexplicable – it is sumpathy.”

— Thomas Mann

115. “Thomas Buddenbrook’s existence was no different from that of an actor – an actor whose lfe has become one long production, which but for a few hours for relaxation, consumes him unceasingly.”

— Thomas Mann

116. “Or was he merely a mollycoddled favorite, enjoying capriciously prejudiced love? Schenback was inclined to believe the latter. Inborn in nearly every artist’s nature is a voluptuous, treacherous tendency to accept the injustice if it creates beauty and to grant sympathy and homage to aristocratic preferences.”

— Thomas Mann

117. “The perishableness of life... imparts value, dignity, interest to life.”

— Thomas Mann

118. “They walked, and the long waves rolled and murmured rhythmically beside them; the fresh salty wind blew free and unobstructed in their faces, wrapped itself around their ears, and made them feel slightly numb and deliciously dizzy. They walked along in that wide, peaceful, whispering hush of the sea that gives every sound, near or far, some mysterious importance.”

— Thomas Mann

119. “Hidden away amongst Aschenbach’s writing was a passage directly asserting that nearly all the great things that exist owe their existence to a defiant despite: it is despite grief and anguish, despite poverty, loneliness, bodily weakness, vice and passion and a thousand inhibitions, that they have come into being at all. But this was more than an observation, it was an experience, it was positively the formula of his life and his fame, the key to his work.”

— Thomas Mann

120. “The accouterments of life were so rich and varied, so elaborated, that almost no place at all was left for life itself. Each and every accessory was so costly and beautiful that it had an existence above and beyond the purpose it was meant to serve – confusing the observer and absorbing attention.”

— Thomas Mann

121. “Ultimately we are only as old as we feel in our hearts and minds.”

— Thomas Mann

122. “Nothing gladdens a writer more than a thought that can become pure feeling and a feeling that can become pure thought.”

— Thomas Mann

123. “He was young and had been rough with time, listening to its bad advice he had made mistakes, had compromised himself, had trespassed against good behavior and prudence, both in his words and works.”

— Thomas Mann

124. “Hans Castorp had found courage up here – if courage before the elements is defined not as a dull, level-headed relationship with them, but a conscious abandonment to them.”

— Thomas Mann

125. “You are stronger than I. I have no armour for the struggle between us, I have only the Word, avenging weapon of the weak. Today I have availed myself of this weapon. This letter is nothing but an act of revenge – you see how honourable I am – and if any word of mine is sharp and bright and beautiful enough to strike home, to make you feel the presence of a power you do not know, to shake even a minute your robust equilibrium, I shall rejoice indeed.” – Tristan.”

— Thomas Mann

126. “If poets use such expressions it is because they need them, because emotion and experience force them out of them, and so it is, surely, with me, though you think them unbecoming in me. You are wrong. They are becoming to whoever needs them, and he has no fear of them, because they are forced out of him.”

— Thomas Mann

127. “For at the moment of the final division, the final miniaturization of matter, suddenly the whole cosmos opened up.”

— Thomas Mann

128. “Did we not, at the very moment of birth, stumble into agonizing captivity? A prison, a prison with bars and chains everywhere!”

— Thomas Mann

129. “I get an odd, intimate, and amusing sensation from having him sit on my foot and warm it with the blood-heat of his body. A pervasive feeling of sympathy and good cheer fills me, as almost invariably when in his company and looking at things from his angle.”

— Thomas Mann

130. “Narrative, however, has two kinds of time: first, its own real time, which like musical time defines its movement and presentation; and second, the time of its contents, which has a perspective quality that can vary widely, from a story in which the narrative’s imaginary time is almost, or indeed totally coincident with its musical time, to one in which it stretches over light-years.”

— Thomas Mann

131. “The dilemma, my dear sir, the tragedy, begins where nature has been cruel enough to split the personality, to shatter its harmony by imprisoning a noble and ardent spirit within a body not fit for the stresses of life. Have you heard of Leopardi, Engineer, or you, Lieutenant? An unhappy poet of my own land, a crippled, ailing man, born with a great soul, which his sufferings were constantly humiliating and dragging down into the depths of irony – its lamentations rend the heart to hear.”

— Thomas Mann

132. “It is as well that the world knows only a fine piece of work and not also its origins, the conditions under which it came into being; for knowledge of the sources of an artist’s inspiration would often confuse readers and shock them, and the excellence of the writing would be of no avail.”

— Thomas Mann

133. “Shall we go away whenever life looks like turning in the slightest uncanny, or not quite normal, or even rather painful and mortifying? No, surely not. Rather stay and look matters in the face, brave them out; perhaps precisely in so doing lies a lesson for us to learn.”

— Thomas Mann

134. “And then he’d rub his cheeks with cold cream because he’d just shaved and the tears stung.”

— Thomas Mann

135. “That was one of the advantages of his age, that he could be sure of his mastery in every moment.”

— Thomas Mann

136. “He always knows instantly whether I have chosen the wild or the world, directly I get outside the door.”

— Thomas Mann

137. “One could say that someone who does nothing but wait is like a glutton whose digestive system processes great masses of food without extracting any useful nourishment. One could go further and say that just as undigested food does not strengthen a man, time spent in waiting does not age him.”

— Thomas Mann

138. “All the days are nothing but the same day repeating itself – or rather, since it is always the same day, it is incorrect to speak of repetition; a continuous present, an identity, an everlastingness – such words as these would better convey the idea.”

— Thomas Mann

139. “Discussions should always be held just before going to bed, your rear protected by sleep. How painful, after an intellectual conversation, to have to go about with your mind so stirred up.”

— Thomas Mann

140. “By now, his morality coincided with his curiosity, probably always had. It was the unconditional curiosity of the tourist thirsty for knowledge; a curiosity that, in having tasted the mystery of personality, had perhaps not been all that far from realms emerging here; a curiosity that displayed something of a military character by not trying to evade something forbidden if it might offer itself.”

— Thomas Mann

141. “Only death dignifies our sufferings in the eyes of others.”

— Thomas Mann

142. “Death alone can make others respect our sufferings; and through death the most pitiable sufferings acquire dignity.”

— Thomas Mann

143. “Whoever is unable to stand up for an ideal with his person, his arm, his blood, is unworthy of that ideal, and no matter how intellectual one may become, what matters is that one remains a man.”

— Thomas Mann

144. “Yet he received this love with joy, surrendered himself to it, and cherished it with all the strength of his being; for he knew that love made one vital and rich, and he longed to be vital and rich, far more than he did to work tranquilly on anything to give it permanent form.”

— Thomas Mann

145. “We come out of darkness and return to darkness, with some experiences in between. But we don’t experience the beginning and the end, birth and death. We are not subjectively aware of them, they exist only in the world of objective events – and that’s that.”

— Thomas Mann

146. “But was it not true that there were people, certain individuals, whom one found it impossible to picture dead, precisely because they were so vulgar? That was to say: they seemed so fit for life, so good at it, that they would never die, as if they were unworthy of the consecration of death.”

— Thomas Mann

147. “One can say that he consumed one whole week waiting for the return of that single hour every seven days – and waiting means racing ahead, means seeing time and the present not as a gift, but as a barrier, denying and negating their value, vaulting over them in your mind. Waiting, people say, is boring. But in actuality, it can just as easily be diverting, because it devours quantities of time without our ever experiencing or using them for their own sake.”

— Thomas Mann

148. “E’ strano. Se un pensiero ti domina, lo trovi espresso dappertutto, ne senti perfino l’odore nel vento, nella vernice, nel profumo della primavera;.”

— Thomas Mann

149. “Now I know that it is not out of our single souls we dream. We dream anonymously and communally, if each after his fashion. The great soul of which we are a part may dream through us, in our manner of dreaming, its own secret dreams, of its youth, its hope, its joy and peace – and its blood-sacrifice. Here.”

— Thomas Mann

150. “There will always be men who are justified in this interest in themselves, this detailed observation of their own emotions; poets who can express with clarity and beauty their privileged inner life, and thereby enrich the emotional world of other people.”

— Thomas Mann