A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth.
--Thomas Mann
A man's dying is more his survivor's affair than his own.
--Thomas Mann
A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
--Thomas Mann
All interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life.
--Thomas Mann
Beauty can pierce one like pain.
--Thomas Mann
Democracy is timelessly human, and timelessness always implies a certain amount of potential youthfulness.
--Thomas Mann
Every reasonable human being should be a moderate Socialist.
--Thomas Mann
Everything is politics.
--Thomas Mann
Hold every moment sacred. Give each clarity and meaning, each the weight of thine awareness, each its true and due fulfillment.
--Thomas Mann
Hold fast the time! Guard it, watch over it, every hour, every minute!
--Thomas Mann
Human reason needs only to will more strongly than fate, and she is fate.
--Thomas Mann
I stand between two worlds, am at home in neither, and in consequence have rather a hard time of it.
--Thomas Mann
If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it.
--Thomas Mann
It is a strange fact that freedom and equality, the two basic ideas of democracy, are to some extent contradictory. Logically considered, freedom and equality are mutually exclusive, just as society and the individual are mutually exclusive.
--Thomas Mann
Only indifference is free. What is distinctive is never free, it is stamped with its own seal, conditioned and chained.
--Thomas Mann
Opinions cannot survive if one has no chance to fight for them.
--Thomas Mann
Order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject- the actual enemy is the unknown.
--Thomas Mann
Speech is civilization itself. The word, even the most contradictory word, preserves contact- it is silence which isolates.
--Thomas Mann
The beautiful word begets the beautiful deed.
--Thomas Mann
The good Lord sees your heart, not the braid on your jacket. Before Him we are all in our birthday suits, generals and common men alike.
--Thomas Mann
The only religious way to think of death is as part and parcel of life; to regard it, with the understanding and the emotions, as the the inviolable condition of life.
--Thomas Mann
There is something suspicious about music, gentlemen. I insist that she is, by her nature, equivocal. I shall not be going too far in saying at once that she is politically suspect.
--Thomas Mann
Time cools, time clarifies, no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours.
--Thomas Mann
Time has no divisions to mark its passage; there is never a thunderstorm to announce the beginning of a new year. Even when a new century begins it is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols.
--Thomas Mann
Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.
--Thomas Mann
Wagner's art is the most sensational self-portrayal and self-critique of German nature that it is possible to conceive.
--Thomas Mann
War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.
--Thomas Mann
What a glorious gift is imagination, and what satisfaction it affords!
--Thomas Mann
Writing well was almost the same as thinking well, and thinking well was the next thing to acting well.
--Thomas Mann
Found 29 occurence(s) in 52,042 quotation(s).