And life? Life itself? Was it perhaps only an infection, a sickening of matter? Was that which one might call the original procreation of matter only a disease, a growth produced by morbid stimulation of the immaterial? The first step toward evil, toward desire and death, was taken precisely then, when there took place that first increase in the density of the spiritual, that pathologically luxuriant morbid growth, produced by the irritant of some unknown infiltration; this, in part pleasurable, in part a motion of self-defense, was the primeval stage of matter, the transition from the insubstantial to the substance. This was the Fall.
THOMAS MANN, The Magic Mountain
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, The Magic Mountain
Democracy is timelessly human, and timelessness always implies a certain amount of potential youthfulness.
THOMAS MANN, The Coming Victory of Democracy
Sometimes a person begins with opinions and judgments and valid criticisms, but then things creep in that have nothing to do with forming opinions, and then it’s all over with strict logic, and what you end up with is an absurd world republic and beautiful style.
THOMAS MANN, The Magic Mountain
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. Yes, it can even, in the twinkling of an eye, make something like a vagabond of the pedant and Philistine. Time, we say, is Lethe; but change of air is a similar draught, and, if it works less thoroughly, does so more quickly.
THOMAS MANN, The Magic Mountain
A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth.
THOMAS MANN, Essay on Freud
In books we never find anything but ourselves. Strangely enough, that always gives us great pleasure, and we say the author is a genius.
Politics has been called the “art of the possible,” and it actually is a realm akin to art insofar as, like art, it occupies a creatively mediating position between spirit and life, the idea and reality.
THOMAS MANN, speech at the U. S. Library of Congress, May 29, 1945
The word was — civilization!
THOMAS MANN, The Magic Mountain
I think of my suffering, of the problem of my suffering. What am I suffering from? From knowledge — is it going to destroy me? What am I suffering from? From sexuality — is it going to destroy me? How I hate it, this knowledge which forces even art to join it! How I hate it, this sensuality, which claims everything fine and good is its consequence and effect. Alas, it is the poison that lurks in everything fine and good! — How am I to free myself of knowledge? By religion? How am I to free myself of sexuality? By eating rice?
THOMAS MANN, letter to Otto Grautoff, 1896
Beauty can pierce one like pain.
THOMAS MANN, Buddenbrooks
Every reasonable human being should be a moderate Socialist.
THOMAS MANN, New York Times, June 18, 1950
Order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject — the actual enemy is the unknown.
THOMAS MANN, The Magic Mountain
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.
