309 Quotes by Thomas Mann

And for its part, what was life? Was it perhaps only an infectious disease of matter – just as the so-called spontaneous generation of matter was perhaps only an illness, a cancerous stimulation of the immaterial?

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.

Whoever is unable to stand up for an ideal with his person, his arm, his blood, is unworthy of that ideal, and no matter how intellectual one may become, what matters is that one remains a man.

Art, in its will to live and progress, puts on the mask of these dull-hearted personal traits in order to manifest, objectivize, and fulfill itself in them.

Yes, like watching someone flog a dead horse into obedience,” Settembrini scoffed; to which Naphta replied that since for our sin God had visited our bodies with the gruesome ignominy of rot and decay, there was no indignity in the same body’s receiving an occasional beating – which immediately brought them to the topic of cremation.

For at the moment of the final division, the final miniaturization of matter, suddenly the whole cosmos opened up.

I dreamed about the nature of man, and about a courteous, reasonable, and respectable community of men – while the ghastly bloody feast went on in the temple behind them. Were they courteous and charming to one another, those sunny folk, out of silent regard for that horror?

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 skepsis, out of moral chaos, can the Absolute spring, the anointed Terror of which the time has need.

Nothing gladdens a writer more than a thought that can become pure feeling and a feeling that can become pure thought.