Top 250 Thomas Mann Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “I can imagine Herr Settembrini coming in suddenly and turning on the light, to let reason and convention reign – it is a weakness of his.”

— Thomas Mann

152. “Quien se esfuerza por alcanzar lo excelso, nota el ansia de reposar en lo perfecto.”

— Thomas Mann

153. “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

154. “So long as we are, death is not; and when death is present, we are not. In other words, between death and us there is no rapport; it is something with which we have nothing to do – and only incidentally the world and nature.”

— Thomas Mann

155. “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

156. “The world seemed spellbound in icy purity, its earthly blemishes veiled; it lay fixed in a deathlike, enchanted trance.”

— Thomas Mann

157. “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

158. “The child of civilization, remote from birth 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. The.”

— Thomas Mann

159. “A lonely, quiet person has observations and experiences that are at once both more indistinct and more penetrating than those of one more gregarious; his thoughts are weightier, stranger, and never without a tinge of sadness. Images and perceptions that others might shrug off with a glance, a laugh, or a brief conversation occupy him unduly, become profound in his silence, become significant, become experience, adventure, emotion.”

— Thomas Mann

160. “My great complaint is that it is my fate to spend my malice upon such insignificant objects. I hope, Engineer, you have nothing against malice? In my eyes, it is reason’s keenest dart against the powers of darkness and ugliness. Malice, my dear sir, is the animating spirit of criticism; and criticism is the beginning of progress and enlightenment.” And.”

— Thomas Mann

161. “He loved the sea and for deep-seated reasons: the hardworking artist’s need for repose, the desire to take shelter from the demanding diversity of phenomena in the bosom of boundless simplicity, a propensity – proscribed and diametrically opposed to his mission in life and for that very reason seductive – a propensity for the unarticulated, the immoderate, the eternal, for nothingness.”

— Thomas Mann

162. “La dicha del escritor es su posibilidad de transformar la idea enteramente en sentimiento; el sentimiento, totalmente en idea.”

— Thomas Mann

163. “But if they had no sun, they had snow. Such masses of snow as Hans Castorp had never till now in all his life beheld.”

— Thomas Mann

164. “Pieter Peeperkorn will now regale himself with a schnapps.”

— Thomas Mann

165. “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

166. “Hans Castorp barely attended. His mouth was open, for he could not have breathed through his nose without sniffing; he felt with dull discomfort that his heart was hammering out of time with the music; and with this combined sense of discord and disorder he was about to doze off.”

— Thomas Mann

167. “I confess the contrariness and mischievousness of his ideas but render our acquaintance the more attractive. I need the friction. Opinions cannot survive if one has no chance to fight for them – and I am only confirmed in mine.”

— Thomas Mann

168. “We shall tell it at length, in precise and thorough detail – for when was a story short on diversion or long on boredom simply because of the time and space required for the telling?”

— Thomas Mann

169. “Don’t you like the sight of a coffin? I really do. I find it a handsome piece of furniture, even empty; when someone is lying in it, then, in my eyes, it is positively sublime.”

— Thomas Mann

170. “Man himself is a mystery, and all humanity rests upon reverence before the mystery that is man.”

— Thomas Mann

171. “To feel stirring within you the wonderful and melancholy play of strange forces and to be aware that those others you yearn for are blithely inaccessible to all that moves you – what a pain is this! And yet! He stood there aloof and alone, staring hopelessly at a drawn blind and making, in his distraction, as though he could look out. But yet he was happy. For he lived. His heart was full...”

— Thomas Mann

172. “The discipline and elegance, the hushed serenity and intellectual challenge, the well-ordered and well-tended life, the precise yet richly varied schedule – it all spoke to Leo’s profoundest instincts.”

— Thomas Mann

173. “Has he really insulted me? But an insult must be of intent, otherwise it can be none.”

— Thomas Mann

174. “It would of course be childish to think that the science of engineering, the rules of mechanics, had found application to organic nature;.”

— Thomas Mann

175. “Evenings like these bore the joyful promise of a new sunny day of loosely ordered leisure and ornamented with countless and closely packed prospects of pleasant encounters.”

— Thomas Mann

176. “Entangled and besotted as he was, he no longer wished for anything else than to pursue the beloved object that inflamed him, to dream about him when he was absent and to speak amorous phrases, after the manner of lovers, to his mere shadow.”

— Thomas Mann

177. “Her friends were the hollow-chested man, the whimsical girl with the fuzzy hair, the silent Dr. Blumenkohl, and the youth with the drooping shoulders...”

— Thomas Mann

178. “The human race had come out of darkness, fear, and hate, but now it was moving forward and upward along a shining road toward a final state of understanding, inner illumination, goodness, and happiness – and technology was the most useful vehicle for traveling that road.”

— Thomas Mann

179. “It was simply that the mechanical laws found themselves repeated and corroborated in nature.”

— Thomas Mann

180. “Literature is the union of suffering with the instinct for form.”

— Thomas Mann

181. “Ma che aveva, dunque? Che cosa mai era quello che, sotto la cenere della sua stanchezza, bruciava oscuro e dolente, senza poter divampare in chiara fiamma?”

— Thomas Mann

182. “Insults must be done with intention, or they are not insults.”

— Thomas Mann

183. “Y quiso el destino que en ese preciso instante entrara Tadzio por la puerta de cristales.”

— Thomas Mann

184. “Even if you do have designs on my cash, and send me down to Pluto with a blow of your oar from behind, you will have rowed me well.”

— Thomas Mann

185. “It’s a craving that shouldn’t even exist, and yet you can’t wish it didn’t exist. Once it has hold of you, you can’t wish it away, because you’d have to wish your life away, it’s so bound up with it, and you can’t do that – what good would dying do? Afterward – with pleasure. In her arms – only too gladly. But before? That’s nonsense, because life is desire, and desire is life, and life can’t be its own enemy.”

— Thomas Mann

186. “But fear of the overall damage that would be done – concern over the recently opened art exhibition in the Public Gardens and the tremendous losses with which the hotels, the shops, the entire, multifaceted tourist trade would be threatened in case of panic and loss of confidence – proved stronger in the city than the love of truth and respect for international covenants: it made the authorities stick stubbornly to their policy of secrecy and denial.”

— Thomas Mann

187. “That’s what people are like: they want talent, which is inherently peculiar, yet they absolutely don’t want the peculiarities connected to it – perhaps necessarily bound up with it – which they refuse to understand or forgive.”

— Thomas Mann

188. “Malice, my dear sir, is the animating spirit of criticism; and criticism is the beginning of progress and enlightenment.”

— Thomas Mann

189. “What was one day, taken for instance from the moment one sat down to the midday meal to the same moment four-and-twenty hours afterwards? It was, to be sure, four-and-twenty hours – but equally it was the simple sum of nothings.”

— Thomas Mann

190. “That seems so strange to me: diseased and stupid both – I don’t exactly know how to express it, but it gives me a most peculiar feeling, when somebody is so stupid, and then ill into the bargain. It must be the most melancholy thing in life.”

— Thomas Mann

191. “Wrapped in his coat, a book in his lap, the traveler took his ease, the hours slipping by unnoticed.”

— Thomas Mann

192. “But the beginning and the end, birth and death, we do not experience; they have no subjective character, they fall entirely n the category of objective events, and that’s that.”

— Thomas Mann

193. “Great words, being worn out, do a poor job of expressing the extraordinary. This is better accomplished by using ordinary words to the uttermost extent of their meaning.”

— Thomas Mann

194. “Yes, it’s almost too beautiful, Tony. By which I mean that it’s all too new yet. It still bothers me a little somehow, and that may be why this bad mood comes over me, nags at me, and ruins everything. I was so looking forward to all this, but, as always, anticipation was the best part, because good things always come too late, and then, when it’s finished and ready, you can’t really enjoy it the way you should.”

— Thomas Mann

195. “Thought that can merge wholly into feeling, feeling that can merge wholly into thought – these are the artist’s highest joy. And our solitary protagonist felt in himself at this moment power to command and wield a thought that thrilled with emotion, an emotion as precise and concentrated as thought: namely, that nature herself shivers with ecstasy when the mind bows down in homage before beauty.”

— Thomas Mann

196. “In truth, they were all admirable scholars, the masters who taught in the cloisters of the old school – once a monastic foundation – under the guidance of a kindly, snuff-taking old head. They were, to a man, well-meaning and sweet- humoured; and they were one in the belief that knowledge and good cheer are not mutually exclusive.”

— Thomas Mann

197. “I shouldn’t be speaking of the present, but rather, perhaps, of the future. When you as Madame So-and-So finally vanish into your proper sphere, one is left to sit on the rocks all the rest of one’s life.”

— Thomas Mann

198. “But it seems a noble and active mind blunts itself against nothing so quickly as the sharp and bitter irritant of knowledge.”

— Thomas Mann

199. “On a personal level, too, art is life intensified: it delights more deeply, consumes more rapidly; it engraves the traces of imaginary and intellectual adventure on the countenance of its servant and in the long run, for all the monastic calm of his external existence, leads to self-indulgence, overrefinement, lethargy, and a restless curiosity that a lifetime of wild passions and pleasures could scarcely engender.”

— Thomas Mann

200. “What is time? A mystery, a figment – and all-powerful.”

— Thomas Mann