Death in Venice and Other Tales Quotes

“Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.”
― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Other Tales

“Nothing is more curious and awkward than the relationship of two people who only know each other with their eyes — who meet and observe each other daily, even hourly and who keep up the impression of disinterest either because of morals or because of a mental abnormality. Between them there is listlessness and pent-up curiosity, the hysteria of an unsatisfied, unnaturally suppressed need for communion and also a kind of tense respect. Because man loves and honors man as long as he is not able to judge him, and desire is a product of lacking knowledge.”
― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Other Tales

“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 and Other Tales

“A solitary, unused to speaking of what he sees and feels, has mental experiences which are at once more intense and less articulate than those of a gregarious man. They are sluggish, yet more wayward, and never without a melancholy tinge. Sights and impressions which others brush aside with a glance, a light comment, a smile, occupy him more than their due; they sink silently in, they take on meaning, they become experience, emotion, adventure. Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.”
― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Other Tales

“There were profound reasons for his attachment to the sea: he loved it because as a hardworking artist he needed rest, needed to escape from the demanding complexity of phenomena and lie hidden on the bosom of the simple and tremendous; because of a forbidden longing deep within him that ran quite contrary to his life's task and was for that very reason seductive, a longing for the unarticulated and immeasurable, for eternity, for nothingness. To rest in the arms of perfection is the desire of any man intent upon creating excellence; and is not nothingness a form of perfection?”
― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Other Tales

“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 and Other Tales

“Even in a personal sense, after all, art is an intensified life. By art one is more deeply satisfied and more rapidly used up. It engraves on the countenance of its servant the traces of imaginary and intellectual adventures, and even if he has outwardly existed in cloistral tranquility, it leads in the long term to overfastidiousness, over-refinement, nervous fatigue and overstimulation, such as can seldom result from a life of the most extravagant passions and pleasures.”
― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Other Tales

“And then the sly arch-lover that he was, he said the subtlest thing of all: that the lover was nearer the divine than the beloved; for the god was in the one but not in the other - perhaps the tenderest, most mocking thought that ever was thought, and source of all the guile and secret bliss the lover knows.”
― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Other Tales

“The fact is that everyone is much too busily preoccupied with himself to be able to form a serious opinion about another person. The indolent world is all too ready to treat any man with whatever degree of respect corresponds to his own self-confidence.”
― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Other Tales

“Innate in nearly every artistic nature is a wanton, treacherous penchant for accepting injustice when it creates beauty and showing sympathy for and paying homage to aristocratic privilege.”
― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Other Tales

“Almost every artistic nature is born with a revealing connoisseurial tendency that appreciates injustice so long as it results in beauty and applauds, even worships aristocratic privilege.”
― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Other Tales

“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, Death in Venice and Other Tales

“Yet whether the pilgrim air the stranger wore kindled his fantasy or whether some other physical or psychical influence came in plays he could not tell; but he felt the most surprising consciousness of a widening of inward barriers, a kind of vaulting unrest, a youthfully ardent thirst for distant scenes - a feeling so lively and so new, or at least so long ago outgrown and forgot, that he stood there rooted to the spot, his eyes on the ground and his hands clasped behind him, exploring these sentiments of his, their bearing and scope.”
― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Other Tales

“Nothing is uglier than a person who despises himself but who, out of cowardice and vanity, is eager to please because he wants to be liked. Nor was it, in my opinion, any different with the lawyer, who, in his almost bootlicking self-belittlement, went beyond the bounds of personal dignity. He was capable of saying to a lady whom he wanted to escort to the table, "Dear madam, I'm a revolting person, but would you do me the honor?..." And, with no talent for self-mockery, he would say it repulsively and in bittersweet torment.”
― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Other Tales

“If I gave in to my nature, I'd lie in bed until afternoon, you can believe me. It's actually hypocrisy for me to get up so early.”
― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Other Tales

“People, after all, only love and respect other people so long as they remain unable to judge them. Longing is a child of ignorance”
― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Other Tales

“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, Death in Venice and Other Tales

“Ah, peace; it was peace, after all, that he wanted! Though not the peace in an empty, hollow void, but a gentle, sunny peace filled with good, tranquil thoughts. All his tender love of life trembled through him at that moment, all the profound yearning for his lost happiness. But then he looked around at the silent, endlessly indifferent peace of nature, saw the river flowing along in the sunshine, saw the grass quivering and moving and the flowers standing where they had blossomed in order to wither and then waft away, saw everything, everything yielding to existence with that mute devotion—and he was suddenly overwhelmed with the sensation of friendship and rapport with the inevitable, which can make us superior to all destiny.”
― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Other Tales

“Herr Läutner came up with pretty items, mostly waltzes and mazurkas, whose gaiety might have been a bit too popular for them to be reckoned (to the extent that I know anything about it) as “music.” Yet each one contained a brief original passage, a modulation, an entry, a harmonic turn, some kind of small nervous effect revealing wit and deftness, for the sake of which they seemed to have been composed in the first place. And this also made them interesting to genuine connoisseurs. Often there was something marvelously doleful and gloomy about those two lonesome measures, a melancholy that stood out against the dance-hall cheeriness of the little pieces—and then quickly and abruptly melted away....”
― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Other Tales

“How good, he thinks, that she breathes in oblivion with every breath she draws! That in childhood each night is a deep wide gulf between one day and the next.”
― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice and Other Tales