The task of a writer consists of being able to make something out of an idea.
Thomas MannRead
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.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the contrasting mental experiences of solitary individuals compared to sociable ones.
Thomas Mann's quote suggests that solitary individuals have deeper, intense emotions and perceptions but often find them difficult to express compared to those who are more outgoing and communicative. The solitude allows for profound introspection, yet this depth of experience can lead to a struggle in articulating those feelings, highlighting a tension between inner depth and external expression.
In practice
During a lecture on the importance of introspection in creative writing.
The task of a writer consists of being able to make something out of an idea.
Stupid — well, there are so many kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst.
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.
I tell them that if they will occupy themselves with the study of mathematics they will find in it the best remedy against the lusts of the flesh.
Literature... is the union of suffering with the instinct for form.
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.
Man has imagined a heaven, and has left entirely out of it the supremest of all his delights...sexual intercourse!...His heaven is like himself: strange, interesting, astonishing, grotesque. I give you my word, it has not a single feature in it that he actually values.
Suddenly absurdism wasn’t an intellectual abstraction, it was actually realism. You could see the way that wealth was begetting wealth, wealth was begetting comfort — and that the cumulative effect of an absence of wealth was the erosion of grace.
Life—the way it really is—is a battle not between good and bad, but between bad and worse
No one should approach the temple of science with the soul of a money changer.
Moreover, the practical recommendations deduced from ecological principles threaten the vested interests of commerce; it is hardly surprising that the financial and political power created by these investments should be used sometimes to suppress environmental impact studies.
Today we are crushed by the sheer weight of the mechanized forces hurled against us, but we can still look to the future in which even greater mechanized forces will bring us victory. Therein lies the destiny of the world.
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