Top 200 Thomas Mann Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Recreation”, which is to say: a refreshing exercise of the organism, because it was in immediate danger of overindulging itself in the uninterrupted monotony of daily life and growing indifferent.”

— 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. “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

104. “Greatness! Extraordinariness! Conquest of the world and immortality of the name! What good was all the happiness of people eternally unknown compared with this goal?”

— Thomas Mann

105. “Passion-means to live for life’s sake but I am well aware you Germans live for the sake of experience. Passion means to forget ones self. But you do things in order to enrich yourselves.”

— 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. “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

108. “The experience of death must ultimately be the experience of life, or else it is only a wraith.”

— Thomas Mann

109. “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

110. “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

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

— Thomas Mann

112. “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

113. “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

114. “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

115. “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

116. “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

117. “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

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

— Thomas Mann

119. “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

120. “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

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

— Thomas Mann

122. “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

123. “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

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. “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

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

— Thomas Mann

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

— Thomas Mann

130. “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

131. “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

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

— Thomas Mann

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

— Thomas Mann

134. “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

135. “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

136. “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

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

— Thomas Mann

138. “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

139. “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

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

— Thomas Mann

141. “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

142. “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

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

— Thomas Mann

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

— Thomas Mann

145. “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

146. “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

147. “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

148. “Pues el hombre ama y respeta al hombre mientras no se halla en condiciones de juzgarlo, y el deseo vehemente es el resultado de un conocimiento imperfecto.”

— Thomas Mann

149. “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

150. “Time, we say, is Lethe; but change of air is a similar draught, and, if it works less thoroughly, does so more quickly.”

— Thomas Mann