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Thomas Mann Quotes

"A man's dying is more the survivors' affair than his own."
Death

"War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace."
War

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

"Animals do not admire each other. A horse does not admire its companion."

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

"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."

"Time has no divisions to mark its passage, there is never a thunder-storm or blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year. Even when a new century begins it is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols."

"This was Venice, the flattering and suspect beauty - this city, half fairy tale and half tourist trap, in whose insalubrious air the arts once rankly and voluptuously blossomed, where composers have been inspired to lulling tones of somniferous eroticism."

"The only religious way to think of death is as part and parcel of life."

"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."

"Extraordinary creature! So close a friend, and yet so remote."

"Human reason needs only to will more strongly than fate, and she is fate."

"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."

"If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it."

"An art whose medium is language will always show a high degree of critical creativeness, for speech is itself a critique of life: it names, it characterizes, it passes judgment, in that it creates."

"Every reasonable human being should be a moderate Socialist."

"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."

"Order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject."

"All interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life."

"The task of a writer consists of being able to make something out of an idea."

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