Thomas Mann (1875–1955) was a German novelist who is considered second only to Goethe among German authors.
Born to a Brazilian Catholic mother and German Lutheran grain merchant in Lübeck, Germany, Mann was a mediocre student. He started writing in his spare time while working as a clerk at an insurance company. He later attended a university to train in journalism.
Mann relocated to Italy for a year with his older brother, the writer Heinrich Mann, where Thomas Mann wrote his first collection of short stories, Little Herr Friedemann (1898.) His first novel was Buddenbrooks (1901.) After numerous novellas, including his best-known work Death in Venice (1913,) Mann wrote The Magic Mountain (1924,) for which he won the 1929 Nobel Prize in Literature.
When Hitler came to power, Mann went into exile in Switzerland and later the United States. He became an American citizen in 1944. After the war, he refused an invitation to return to Germany to live.
Mann lived in Santa Monica, California, for most of the rest of his life. He worked on the tetralogy Joseph and His Brothers (1933–45,) a reinterpretation of the biblical story with modern-day themes. Even though Mann considered this extensive opus to be his most significant work, few literary critics shared this assessment.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Thomas Mann
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.
—Thomas Mann
Topics: Romance, Love
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
Topics: Solitude
A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
—Thomas Mann
Topics: Writing
Disease makes men more physical; it leaves them with nothing but body.
—Thomas Mann
Topics: Health
Opinions cannot survive if one has no chance to fight for them.
—Thomas Mann
Topics: Opinion, Opinions
A man lives not only his personal life as an individual but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.
—Thomas Mann
Topics: Activism, Living, Service, Miscellaneous
A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth.
—Thomas Mann
The only religious way to think of death is as part and parcel of life.
—Thomas Mann
Topics: Death, Dying
We, when we sow the seeds of doubt deeper than the most up-to-date and modish free-thought has ever dreamed of doing, we well know what we are about. Only out of radical skeptics, out of moral chaos, can the Absolute spring, the anointed Terror of which the time has need.
—Thomas Mann
Topics: Doubt, Skepticism
The meeting in the open of two dogs, strangers to each other, is one of the most painful, thrilling, and pregnant of all conceivable encounters; it is surrounded by an atmosphere of the last canniness, presided over by a constraint for which I have no precise name; they simply cannot pass each other, their mutual embarrassment is frightful to behold.
—Thomas Mann
Topics: Dogs
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
Topics: Democracy
Extraordinary creature! So close a friend, and yet so remote.
—Thomas Mann
Topics: Dogs
What we call mourning for our dead is perhaps not so much grief at not being able to call them back; as it is grief at not being able to want to do so
—Thomas Mann
Topics: Grief
No one remains quite what he was when he recognizes himself.
—Thomas Mann
Topics: Self-Discovery, Self-Knowledge, Awareness
All interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life.
—Thomas Mann
Topics: Medicine
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
Topics: Music
People’s behavior makes sense if you think about it in terms of their goals, needs, and motives.
—Thomas Mann
Topics: Behavior
It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.
—Thomas Mann
Topics: Love
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.
—Thomas Mann
Topics: Language
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.
—Thomas Mann
Topics: Solitude
Every reasonable human being should be a moderate Socialist.
—Thomas Mann
Topics: Socialism, Communism
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
Topics: Equality
The electrifying influence exercised on a whole generation just after the First World War by Demian…is unforgettable. With uncanny accuracy this poetic work struck the nerve of the times and called forth grateful rapture from a whole youthful generation who believed that an interpreter of their innermost life had risen from their own midst.
—Thomas Mann
Topics: Authors & Writing
A man’s dying is more the survivors’ affair than his own.
—Thomas Mann
Topics: Death
I have always been an admirer. I regard the gift of admiration as indispensable if one is to amount to something; I don’t know where I would be without it.
—Thomas Mann
Topics: Admiration
Time cools, time clarifies; no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours.
—Thomas Mann
Topics: Patience, Resilience
Hold fast the time! Guard it, watch over it, every hour, every minute! Unregarded it slips away, like a lizard, smooth, slippery, faithless, a pixy wife. Hold every moment sacred. Give each clarity and meaning, each the weight of thine awareness, each its true and due fulfillment.
—Thomas Mann
Topics: Time
Speech is civilization itself. The word… preserves contact—it is silence which isolates.
—Thomas Mann
Topics: Conversation, Speech
Time has no division to mark its passage, there is never a thunderstorm 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 pistols.
—Thomas Mann
Topics: Time
If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it.
—Thomas Mann
Topics: Positive Attitudes, Optimism, Ideas
Thoughts come clearly while one walks.
—Thomas Mann
Topics: Walking
Space, like time, engenders forgetfulness; but it does so by setting us bodily free from our surroundings and giving us back our primitive, unattached state
—Thomas Mann
Topics: Space
What is uttered is finished and done with.
—Thomas Mann
Topics: Speaking, Speakers
Is not life in itself a thing of goodness, irrespective of whether the course it takes for us can be called a ‘happy’ one?
—Thomas Mann
War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.
—Thomas Mann
Topics: War
Democracy is eternal and human. It dignifies the human being; it respects humanity.
—Thomas Mann
Topics: Democracy
You ask what is the use of classification, arrangement, systemization? I answer you: order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject-the actual enemy is the unknown.
—Thomas Mann
Topics: Simplicity, Mystery, Order
Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.
—Thomas Mann
Topics: Tolerance
Whose best and most fruitful gift was the power of admiration, which made it possible for me to learn. Now, as in my youth, I am looking up to the truly great creations of the past, which I see high above my own and which alone deserve the name of greatness.
—Thomas Mann
Topics: Respect
Human reason needs only to will more strongly than fate, and she is fate.
—Thomas Mann
Topics: Fate
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