Quotes from Thomas Mann

Don't you love to look at coffins? I've always enjoyed looking at one now and then. I think of a coffin as an absolutely lovely piece of furniture, even when it's empty, and if there's someone lying in it, it's really quite sublime in my eyes.

What they, in their innocence, cannot comprehend is that a properly constituted, healthy, decent man never writes, acts, or composes.

To be young means to be original, to have remained nearer to the sources of life: it means to be able to stand up and shake off the fetters of an outlived civilization, to dare -- where others lack the courage-- to plunge again into the elemental.

The sweet spot is where duty and delight converge.

The accouterments of life were so rich and varied, so elaborated, that almost no place at all was left for life itself. Each and every accessory was so costly and beautiful that it had an existence above and beyond the purpose it was meant to serve – confusing the observer and absorbing attention.

Denn der Mensch liebt und ehrt den Menschen , solange er ihn nicht zu beurteilen vermag, und die Sehnsucht ist ein Erzeunis mangelhafter Erkenntnis.

The Ladies Buddenbrook from Breite Strasse did not weep, however - it was not their custom. Their faces, a little less caustic than usual at least, expressed a gentle satisfaction at death's impartiality.

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?

You will lead, you will strike up the march of the future, boys will swear by your name, and thanks to your madness they will no longer need to be mad.

The little hand on time's clock trips away as though measuring seconds; but God knows how much time it is covering when it whisks round heedless of the divisions it passes over! So much is certain, that we have been up here for years. Our brains reel, surely this is an evil dream, though dreamed with nor hashish nor opium; a censor of morals would rebuke us for it.

Her smile and voice suggested the kind of excitement that comes when the first words in a long, silent relationship are spoken at last - a subtle excitement secretly incorporating into this one moment everything that has happened until now.

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

One could say that someone who does nothing but wait is like a glutton whose digestive system processes great masses of food without extracting any useful nourishment. One could go further and say that just as undigested food does not strengthen a man, time spent in waiting does not age him.

Deep is the well of the past. Should we not call it bottomless?

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

The experience of death must ultimately be the experience of life, or else it is only a wraith.

Every reasonable human being should be a moderate Socialist.

If poets use such expressions it is because they need them, because emotion and experience force them out of them, and so it is, surely, with me, though you think them unbecoming in me. You are wrong. They are becoming to whoever needs them, and he has no fear of them, because they are forced out of him.

Denn das Glück, sagte er sich, ist nicht, geliebt zu werden; das ist mit Ekel gemischte Genugtuung für die Eitelkeit. Das Glück ist, zu lieben und vielleicht kleine, trügerische Annäherungen an den geliebten Gegenstand zu erhaschen.

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?

Strangely fruitful intercourse this, between one body and another mind

Ultimately we are only as old as we feel in our hearts and minds.

only the exhaustive can be truly interesting.

But the boredom of Frau Spatz had by now reached that pitch where it distorts the countenance of man, makes the eyes protrude from the head, and lends the features a corpselike and terrifying aspect. More than that, this music acted on the nerves that controlled her digestion, producing in her dyspeptic organism such malaise that she was really afraid she would have an attack.