309 Quotes by Thomas Mann

You are stronger than I. I have no armour for the struggle between us, I have only the Word, avenging weapon of the weak. Today I have availed myself of this weapon. This letter is nothing but an act of revenge – you see how honourable I am – and if any word of mine is sharp and bright and beautiful enough to strike home, to make you feel the presence of a power you do not know, to shake even a minute your robust equilibrium, I shall rejoice indeed.” – Tristan.

In Kant and Nietzsche we have the moralists of German militarism.

Is not life in itself a thing of goodness, irrespective of whether the course it takes for us can be called a ‘happy’ one?

If poets use such expressions it is because they need them, because emotion and experience force them out of them, and so it is, surely, with me, though you think them unbecoming in me. You are wrong. They are becoming to whoever needs them, and he has no fear of them, because they are forced out of him.

Recreation”, which is to say: a refreshing exercise of the organism, because it was in immediate danger of overindulging itself in the uninterrupted monotony of daily life and growing indifferent.

For happiness, he told himself, isn’t being loved; that was just a slightly nauseous satisfaction of vanity. Happiness is loving and perhaps seizing a few short illusory moments of intimacy with the object of one’s love.

But was it not true that there were people, certain individuals, whom one found it impossible to picture dead, precisely because they were so vulgar? That was to say: they seemed so fit for life, so good at it, that they would never die, as if they were unworthy of the consecration of death.

It is most certainly a good thing that the world knows only the beautiful opus but not its origins, not the conditions of its creation; for if people knew the sources of the artist’s inspiration, that knowledge would often confuse them, alarm them, and thereby destroy the effects of excellence. strange hours! strangely enervating labor! bizarrely fertile intercourse of the mind with a body!

Greatness! Extraordinariness! Conquest of the world and immortality of the name! What good was all the happiness of people eternally unknown compared with this goal?