The Magic Mountain

by Thomas Mann

On the whole, however, it seemed to him that although honor had its advantages, so, too, did disgrace, and that indeed the advantages of the latter were almost boundless.

A soul without a body is as inhuman and horrible as a body without a soul—whereby the first is the rare exception and the latter the rule. Normally it is the body that grows unchecked, usurping all importance, all life to itself, emancipating itself in the most loathsome fashion. A human being who lives as an invalid is only a body, and that is the most inhuman of debasements—in

Ah yes, irony! Beware of the irony that flourishes here, my good engineer. Beware of it in general as an intellectual stance. When it is not employed as an honest device of classical rhetoric, the purpose of which no healthy mind can doubt for a moment, it becomes a source of depravity, a barrier to civilization, a squalid flirtation with inertia, nihilism, and vice. And since the atmosphere in which we live provides very favorable conditions for this swamp plant to flourish, I may hope—or perhaps I must fear—that you do understand me.”

(Such is the ingratitude of immature youth. It accepts the gift of learning, only to find fault with it.)

Ah, the immoderate receptivity of youth—it can drive an educator to despair, because it is always ready to apply itself to bad ends.

To see the world divided into hostile camps, that is Spirit.

It is ultimately a cruel misunderstanding of youth to believe it will find its heart’s desire in freedom. Its deepest desire is to obey.”

“Opposites,” Naphta said, “may very well be reconciled. But what is mediocre and makeshift will never be.

For the sake of the soul, people had certainly subjected the body to less than tender treatment, in oh-so-many ingenious ways. There had not even been screams. The pear had been shoved into the open mouth, the famous pear, not a very tasty fruit, to be sure—and then silence had reigned as they went about their business.

We don’t form our dreams out of just our own souls. We dream anonymously and communally, though each in his own way. The great soul, of which we are just a little piece, dreams through us so to speak, dreams in our many different ways its own eternal, secret dream—about its youth, its hope, its joy, its peace, and its bloody feast.

literature as the basic impulse of humanity, about the human spirit, which, mock as he might, was spirit per se, the miracle uniting analysis and form.

The purifying, sanctifying effect of literature, the destruction of passions through knowledge and the Word;

“The error of literary men is to believe that only the Spirit makes us respectable. The opposite is closer to the truth. Only where there is no Spirit are we respectable.” “Well,” Hans Castorp thought, “there’s a Delphic remark for you. And if you purse your lips tight after delivering it, that will certainly intimidate everyone for a bit.”

I am, to be frank, not a passionate man, but I do have my passions, detached passions.” “I find it terribly reassuring,” she said, letting the inhaled smoke pour back out, “to hear that you are not a passionate man. But, then, how could you be? That would be a degeneration of the species. Passion—means to live life for life’s sake. But I am well aware you Germans live it for the sake of experience. Passion means to forget oneself. But you do things in order to enrich yourselves.

There are two ways to life: the one is the regular, direct, and good way. The other is bad, it leads through death, and that is the way of genius.”

Man is nothing more than the organ by which God consummates His marriage with awakened and intoxicated life.

life can’t be its own enemy.

the difference, or even contradiction, between external and internal freedom—and at the same time the ticklish question as to which form of unfreedom was least or most likely, hee hee, to be compatible with a nation’s honor. Freedom was in fact probably more an idea of Romanticism than of the Enlightenment, for as a concept it shared with Romanticism the same complex, never-to-be-disentangled interlocking of the human instinct to expand and the passionate, constricting thrust of the individual ego. The thirst for individual freedom had brought forth the bellicose cult of nationalism, which humanitarian liberalism called sinister, although it, too, taught the doctrine of individualism, but from a slightly different angle. Individualism was romantically medieval in its belief in the infinite, cosmic importance of each single creature, from which came the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, the theory of geocentrism, and astrology.

On the other hand, individualism was a matter of liberal humanism, which tended toward anarchy and wanted at all costs to protect the precious individual from being sacrificed to the interests of the whole. That was individualism, one thing and yet another, a word for all seasons.

It was a democracy of banquet tables,