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.
— Thomas Mann
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.
What we call National-Socialism is the poisonous perversion of ideas which have a long history in German intellectual life.
I never can understand how anyone can not smoke - it deprives a man of the best part of life. With a good cigar in his mouth a man is perfectly safe, nothing can touch him, literally.
A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.
I love and reverence the Word, the bearer of the spirit, the tool and gleaming ploughshare of progress.
Has the world ever been changed by anything save the thought and its magic vehicle the Word?
The writer's joy is the thought that can become emotion, the emotion that can wholly become a thought.
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.
We don't love qualities, we love persons; sometimes by reason of their defects as well as of their qualities.
Respectable means rich, and decent means poor. I should die if I heard my family called decent.
A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth.
I don't think anyone is thinking long-term now.
What is uttered is finished and done with.
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.
If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it.
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.
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.
One has the idea of a stupid man as perfectly healthy and ordinary, and of illness as making one refined and clever and unusual.
What a wonderful phenomenon it is, carefully considered, when the human eye, that jewel of organic structures, concentrates its moist brilliance on another human creature!
Only he who desires is amiable and not he who is satiated.
For the beautiful word begets the beautiful deed.
Psycho-analyses, how disgusting.
Speech is civilization itself.
Disease makes men more physical, it leaves them nothing but body.
Literature... is the union of suffering with the instinct for form.
Time cools, time clarifies; no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours.
Opinions cannot survive if one has no chance to fight for them.
He who loves the more is the inferior and must suffer.
It could become much worse.
The task of a writer consists of being able to make something out of an idea.
Every reasonable human being should be a moderate Socialist.
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.
The only religious way to think of death is as part and parcel of life.
But my deepest and most secret love belongs to the fair-haired and the blue-eyed, the bright children of life, the happy, the charming and the ordinary.
Culture and possessions, there is the bourgeoisie for you.
One always has the idea of a stupid man as perfectly healthy and ordinary, and of illness as making one refined and clever and unusual.
For the myth is the foundation of life; it is the timeless schema, the pious formula into which life flows when it reproduces its traits out of the unconscious.
Democracy is timelessly human, and timelessness always implies a certain amount of potential youthfulness.
Reduced to a miserable mass level, the level of a Hitler, German Romanticism broke out into hysterical barbarism.
Everything is politics.
For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts.
I shall need to sleep three weeks on end to get rested from the rest I've had.
People's behavior makes sense if you think about it in terms of their goals, needs, and motives.
A man's dying is more his survivor's affair than his own.
One must die to life in order to be utterly a creator.
A harmful truth is better than a useful lie.
Order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject.
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.
Human reason needs only to will more strongly than fate, and she is fate.
