Quotes from Thomas Mann

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

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

What a wonderful phenomenon it is, carefully considered, when the human eye, that jewel of organic structures, concentrates its moist brilliance on another human creature!

For the beautiful word begets the beautiful deed.

Has the world ever been changed by anything save the thought and its magic vehicle the Word?

Reduced to a miserable mass level, the level of a Hitler, German Romanticism broke out into hysterical barbarism.

Democracy is timelessly human, and timelessness always implies a certain amount of potential youthfulness.

Animals do not admire each other. A horse does not admire its companion.

It could become much worse.

I love and reverence the Word, the bearer of the spirit, the tool and gleaming ploughshare of progress.

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

The task of a writer consists of being able to make something out of an idea.

The writer's joy is the thought that can become emotion, the emotion that can wholly become a thought.

A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

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

Only love, and not reason, yields kind thoughts.

Time has no divisions to mark its passage, there is never a thunder-storm or blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year. Even when a new century begins it is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols.

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

Yes, they are carnal, both of them, love and death, and therein lies their terror and their great magic!

For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts.

For I must tell you that we artists cannot tread the path of Beauty without Eros keeping company with us and appointing himself as our guide.

Every reasonable human being should be a moderate Socialist.

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.

Distance in a straight line has no mystery. The mystery is in the sphere.