Famous Quotes

Quotes by Thomas Mann

• A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth.
• A harmful truth is better than a useful lie.
• All interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life.
• 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.
• Everything is politics.
• For I must tell you that we artists cannot tread the path of Beauty without Eros keeping company with us and appointing himself as our guide.
• For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts.
• For to be poised against fatality, to meet adverse conditions gracefully, is more than simple endurance it is an act of aggression, a positive triumph.
• 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.
• It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.
• Respectable means rich, and decent means poor. I should die if I heard my family called decent.
• 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.
• The Freudian theory is one of the most important foundation stones for an edifice to be built by future generations, the dwelling of a freer and wiser humanity.
• The only religious way to think of death is as part and parcel of 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.
• War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.
• What we call National-Socialism is the poisonous perversion of ideas which have a long history in German intellectual life.