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. “La vanidad no es algo grande y la grandeza no puede por tanto ser vanidosa .”

— Thomas Mann

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

— Thomas Mann

154. “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

155. “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

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. “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

159. “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

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

— Thomas Mann

164. “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

165. “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

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

— Thomas Mann

167. “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

168. “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

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. “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

171. “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

172. “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

173. “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

174. “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

175. “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

176. “Spain was not a lack of form, but an excess of form, death as form, so to speak – not death as dissolution, but death as something austere, black, elegant, and bloody, the Inquisition, starched ruffs, Loyola, the Escorial.”

— Thomas Mann

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

— Thomas Mann

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

— Thomas Mann

179. “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

180. “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

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

— Thomas Mann

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

— Thomas Mann

183. “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

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. “Let me tell you the whole truth: if ever Fascism should come to America, it will come in the name of freedom.”

— Thomas Mann

194. “Thou art so shrewd, and so false,” he said wearily, “and I can make no head against thee, nor should anyone try since thou wilt but set him in the wrong. But when I look around me, I am as in a dream. All that I see is mine, daughters, children, flocks and waggons and beasts and men, they are mine, but have passed over into thy hands I know not how, and thou takest away all before mine eyes, till I am as in a dream.”

— Thomas Mann

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

— Thomas Mann

196. “Innate in nearly every artistic nature is a wanton, treacherous penchant for accepting injustice when it creates beauty.”

— Thomas Mann

197. “Consider your self-respect, your pride. Do not lose yourself in an alien world. Avoid that swamp, that isle of Circe – for you are not Odysseus enough to dwell there unharmed. You will walk on all fours, you are tipping down onto your front limbs already, and will soon begin to grunt – beware!”

— Thomas Mann

198. “Knowledge never hurts.”

— Thomas Mann

199. “Freedom exists, and also the will exists; but the freedom of the will does not exist, for a will that aims at its own freedom aims at the unknown.”

— Thomas Mann

200. “When the moral courage to make decisions and distinctions between reality and deception degenerates to that point, then there is an end of life, of judgement, of the creative deed: the process of decay sets in, moral scepsis, and does its deadly work.”

— Thomas Mann