Quotes About Thomas Mann

MOM LIKED THE Ritalin. And she found it had a terrific and unexpected side effect—it helped her read. The day she first tried it, she was tired and uncomfortable and having trouble concentrating. She popped the Ritalin right before she sat down with Thomas Mann's Joseph and His Brothers, a fifteen-hundred-page book that she'd been attempting to read after a friend gave it to her.

Literature was the first sector of German culture to be completely subjected to the 'new National Socialist values', and its policy towards books became, as Thomas Mann declared, the very symbol of the regime: for all Europe, the Third Reich would remain the country where books were burned.

Psycho-analyses, how disgusting.

23 The novelist Thomas Mann noted in his diary on March 27, 1933, two months after Hitler had become German chancellor, that he had witnessed a revolution of a kind never seen before, "without underlying ideas, against ideas, against everything nobler, better, decent, against freedom, truth and justice." The "common scum" had taken power, "accompanied by vast rejoicing on the part of the masses.

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

I regarded it more as an honor than a disgrace to be permitted to share this fate of the complete destruction of literary existence in Germany with such eminent contemporaries as Thomas Mann, Heinrich Mann, Werfel, Freud, Einstein, and many others whose work I consider incomparably more important than my own

Every reasonable human being should be a moderate Socialist.

A stimulus is a stimulus. The body doesn't give a damn about the meaning of the stimulus. Whether minnows or communion, the sebaceous glands stand up erect.

But sometimes a person begins with opinions and judgments and valid criticisms, but then things creep in that have nothing to do with forming opinions, and then it's all over with strict logic, and what you end up with is an absurd world republic and beautiful style.

For he used to say...that knowledge of the soul would unfailingly make us melancholy if the pleasures of expression did not keep us alert and of good cheer.

Hans Castorp was, for his own person, quite without arrogance; yet a larger arrogance, the pride of caste and tradition, stood written on his brow and in his sleepy-looking eyes, and voiced itself in the conviction of his own superiority, which came over him when he measured Frau Chauchat for what she was.

Hans Castorp had found courage up here--if courage before the elements is defined not as a dull, level-headed relationship with them, but a conscious abandonment to them.

Malice, my dear sir, is the animating spirit of criticism; and criticism is the beginning of progress and enlightenment

Frau Stöhr, however, who happened to be sitting not all that far from the trio, had apparently abandoned herself to the film; her red, uneducated face was contorted with pleasure.

Miss von Osterloh had looked through it once during an idle fifteen minutes and pronunce it quite sophisticated, which veredict was her euphemism for inhumanly boring.

Hans Castorp barely attended. His mouth was open, for he could not have breathed through his nose without sniffing; he felt with dull discomfort that his heart was hammering out of time with the music; and with this combined sense of discord and disorder he was about to doze off

It would of course be childish to think that the science of engineering, the rules of mechanics, had found application to organic nature;

What, she's French?' he repeats. And what do you suppose this tall dragoon says next?—'An émigrée, you mean?' he says. 'But then she must be an enemy of philosophy!

But if they had no sun, they had snow. Such masses of snow as Hans Castorp had never till now in all his life beheld.

étui from beneath his cloak, and handed

That seems so strange to me: diseased and stupid both—I don't exactly know how to express it, but it gives me a most peculiar feeling, when somebody is so stupid, and then ill into the bargain. It must be the most melancholy thing in life.

Now I know that it is not out of our single souls we dream. We dream anonymously and communally, if each after his fashion. The great soul of which we are a part may dream through us, in our manner of dreaming, its own secret dreams, of its youth, its hope, its joy and peace—and its blood-sacrifice. Here

Richard Wagner once declared that civilization disappears before music like mist before the sun. he never dreamed that one day, for its part, music would disappear before civilization, before democracy, like mist before the sun.

And with that she dipped her fourth slice of raisin bread in her coffee.