Thomas Mann Quotes

Everything is politics.

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

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

Speech is civilization itself.

What good would politics be, if it didn’t give everyone the opportunity to make moral compromises.

For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts.

Technology and comfort - having those, people speak of culture, but do not have it.

A man’s dying is more the survivors’ affair than his own.

I don't think anyone is thinking long-term now.

No man remains quite what he was when he recognizes himself.

One must die to life in order to be utterly a creator.

Time cools, time clarifies; no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours.

Every reasonable human being should be a moderate Socialist.

He who loves the more is the inferior and must suffer.

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

Distance in a straight line has no mystery. The mystery is in the sphere.

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

Only love, and not reason, yields kind thoughts.

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

A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth.

Art is the funnel, as it were, through which spirit is poured into life.

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

A harmful truth is better than a useful lie.

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

Laughter is a sunbeam of the soul.

Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.