Quotes from Thomas Mann

Disease makes men more physical, it leaves them nothing but body.

What good would politics be, if it didn't give everyone the opportunity to make moral compromises.

I stand between two worlds. I am at home in neither, and I suffer in consequence. You artists call me a bourgeois, and the bourgeois try to arrest me...I don't know which makes me feel worse.

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.

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.

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.

Everything is politics.

Respectable means rich, and decent means poor. I should die if I heard my family called decent.

Culture and possessions, there is the bourgeoisie for you.

There is only one real misfortune: to forfeit one's own good opinion of oneself. Lose your complacency, once betray your own self-contempt and the world will unhesitatingly endorse it.

No man remains quite what he was when he recognizes himself.

What the collective age wants allows and approves is the perpetual holiday from the self.

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.

I shall need to sleep three weeks on end to get rested from the rest I've had.

Only he who desires is amiable and not he who is satiated.

Art is the funnel, as it were, through which spirit is poured into life.

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

Psycho-analyses, how disgusting.

All interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life.

What is uttered is finished and done with.

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.

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

What we call National-Socialism is the poisonous perversion of ideas which have a long history in German intellectual life.