"A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people."
— Thomas Mann

"No man remains quite what he was when he recognizes himself."
— Thomas Mann

"He who loves the more is the inferior and must suffer."
— Thomas Mann

"It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death."
— Thomas Mann (The Magic Mountain)

"Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But it also gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd."
— Thomas Mann

"This was love at first sight, love everlasting: a feeling unknown, unhoped for, unexpected--in so far as it could be a matter of conscious awareness; it took entire possession of him, and he understood, with joyous amazement, that this was for life."
— Thomas Mann

"Solitude begets originality, bold and disconcerting beauty, poetry. But solitude can also beget perversity, disparity, the absurd and the forbidden."
— Thomas Mann (Death in Venice)

"Art is the funnel, as it were, through which spirit is poured into life."
— Thomas Mann

"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 (Death in Venice)

"There is only one real misfortune: to forfeit one's own good opinion of oneself. Lose your complacency, once betray your own self-contempt and the world will unhesitatingly endorse it."
— Thomas Mann

"Yes, they are carnal, both of them, love and death, and therein lies their terror and their great magic!"
— Thomas Mann

"It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.
"
— Thomas Mann

"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

"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

"Thought that can merge wholly into feeling, feeling that can merge wholly into thought - these are the artist's highest joy."
— Thomas Mann

"In books we never find anything but ourselves. Strangely enough, that always gives us great pleasure, and we say the author is a genius."
— Thomas Mann

"The books and magazines streamed in. He could buy them all, they piled up around him and even while he read, the number of those still to be read disturbed him. … they stood in rows, weighing down his life like a possession which he did not succeed in subordinating to his personality."
— Thomas Mann

"A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people"
— Thomas Mann

"Wahrscheinlich kann man vom Nichtwollen seelisch nicht leben; eine Sache nicht tun wollen, das ist auf Dauer kein Lebensinhalt."
— Thomas Mann (Mario und der Zauberer)

"Forbearance in the face of fate, beauty constant under torture, are not merely passive. They are a positive achievement, an explicit triumph."
— Thomas Mann (Death in Venice)

"La barbarie n est le contraire de la culture que dans le cadre de la hierarchie de pensee que celle-ci nous propose. "
— Thomas Mann

"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

"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

"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

"A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries. He may regard the general, impersonal foundations of his existence as definitely settled and taken for granted, and be as far from assuming a critical attitude towards them as our good Hans Castorp really was; yet it is quite conceivable that he may none the less be vaguely conscious of the deficiencies of his epoch and find them prejudicial to his own moral well-being. All sorts of personal aims, hopes, ends, prospects, hover before the eyes of the individual, and out of these he derives the impulse to ambition and achievement. Now, if the life about him, if his own time seems, however outwardly stimulating, to be at bottom empty of such food for his aspirations; if he privately recognises it to be hopeless, viewless, helpless, opposing only a hollow silence to all the questions man puts, consciously or unconsciously, yet somehow puts, as to the final, absolute, and abstract meaning in all his efforts and activities; then, in such a case, a certain laming of the personality is bound to occur, the more inevitably the more upright the character in question; a sort of palsy, as it were, which may extend from his spiritual and moral over into his physical and organic part. In an age that affords no satisfying answer to the eternal question of 'Why?' 'To what end?' a man who is capable of achievement over and above the expected modicum must be equipped either with a moral remoteness and single-mindedness which is rare indeed and of heroic mould, or else with an exceptionally robust vitality. Hans Castorp had neither one nor the other of these; and thus he must be considered mediocre, though in an entirely honourable sense.
"
— Thomas Mann (The Magic Mountain)

"Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportianate, the absurd and the forbidden."
— Thomas Mann (Death in Venice)

"Naphta loathed the bourgeois state and its love of security. He found occasion to express this loathing one autumn afternoon when, as they were walking along the main street, it suddenly began to rain and, as if on command, there was an umbrella over every head. That was a symbol of cowardice and vulgar effeminacy, the end product of civilization. An incident like the sinking of the Titanic was atavistic, true, but its effect was most refreshing, it was the handwriting on the wall. Afterward, of course, came the hue and cry for more security in shipping. How pitiful, but such weak-willed humanitarianism squared very nicely with the wolfish cruelty and villainy of slaughter on the economic battlefield known as the bourgeois state. War, war ! He was all for it – the universal lust or war seemed quite honorable in comparison."
— Thomas Mann (The Magic Mountain)

"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 (Death in Venice)

"Protestantism harbors within it certain elements – just as the Great Reformer himself harbored such elements within his personality. I am thinking here of a sentimentality, a trancelike self-hypnosis that is not European, that is foreign and hostile to our active hemisphere’s law of life. Just look at him, this Luther. Look at the portraits, both as a young man and later. What a skull, what cheekbones, what a strange set to the eyes. My friend, that is Asia. I would be surprised, would be astonished, if Wendish-Slavic-Sarmatian blood was not at work there, and if it was not this massive phenomenon of a man – and who would deny him that – who proved to be a fatal weight placed on one of the two precariously balanced scales of your nation, on the Eastern scale, which caused – and still causes – the Western scale to fly heavenward."
— Thomas Mann (The Magic Mountain)

"Frau Stöhr, however, who happened to be sitting not all that far from the trio, had apparently abandoned herself to the film; her red, uneducated face was contorted with pleasure."
— Thomas Mann (The Magic Mountain)

"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 (The Magic Mountain)

"Frau Stöhr found his remarks amphibious and unfeeling."
— Thomas Mann (The Magic Mountain)

"A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people."
— Thomas Mann

"Car lorsque les yeux parlent, ils tutoient, lors même que les lèvres n'ont pas encore prononcé un "vous". "
— Thomas Mann (The Magic Mountain)

"We do not fear being called meticulous, inclining as we do to the view that only the exhaustive can be truly interesting."
— Thomas Mann (The Magic Mountain)

"...when life still hesitates to touch us, when neither duty nor guilt dares lay a hand upon us"
— Thomas Mann (Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family)

"Frau Stöhr, however, who happened to be sitting not all that far from the trio, had apparently abandoned herself to the film; her red, uneducated face was contorted with pleasure."
— Thomas Mann