Thomas Mann

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

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

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

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.

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

Speech is civilization itself.

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

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

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

A lonely, quiet person has observations and experiences that are at once both more indistinct and more penetrating than those of one more gregarious; his thoughts are weightier, stranger, and never without a tinge of sadness. . . . Loneliness fosters that which is original, daringly and bewilderingly beautiful, poetic. But loneliness also fosters that which is perverse, incongruous, absurd, forbidden.

To allow only the kind of art that the average man understands is the worst small-mindedness and the murder of mind and spirit. It is my conviction that the intellect can be certain that in doing what most disconcerts the crowd, in pursuing the most daring, unconventional advances and explorations, it will in some highly indirect fashion serve man - and in the long run, all men.

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

Even in a personal sense, after all, art is an intensified life. By art one is more deeply satisfied and more rapidly used up. It engraves on the countenance of its servant the traces of imaginary and intellectual adventures, and even if he has outwardly existed in cloistral tranquility, it leads in the long term to overfastidiousness, over-refinement, nervous fatigue and overstimulation, such as can seldom result from a life of the most extravagant passions and pleasures.

Often I have thought of the day when I gazed for the first time at the sea. The sea is vast, the sea is wide, my eyes roved far and wide and longed to be free. But there was the horizon. Why a horizon, when I wanted the infinite from life?

In books we never find anything but ourselves. Strangely enough, that always gives us great pleasure, and we say the author is a genius.

He thought what a fine thing it was that people made music all over the world, even in the strangest settings – probably even on polar expeditions.

What pleases the public is lively and vivid delineation which makes no demands on the intellect; but passionate and absolutist youth can only be enthralled by a problem.

Thought that can merge wholly into feeling, feeling that can merge wholly into thought - these are the artist's highest joy.

This was love at first sight, love everlasting: a feeling unknown, unhoped for, unexpected--in so far as it could be a matter of conscious awareness; it took entire possession of him, and he understood, with joyous amazement, that this was for life.