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| Thomas Mann |
Today
is the birthday of a German novelist, short story writer, social critic,
philanthropist, essayist Thomas Mann. Mann's (6
June 1875 – 12 August 1955) analysis and critique of the European and German
soul used modernized German and Biblical stories, as well as the ideas of
Goethe, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer. Presenting some Quotations : Being Poet
·
A writer is someone
for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
·
It is love, not
reason, that is stronger than death.
·
unworthy of the
consecration of death.
·
... a secret and
ardent stirring within the frozen chastity of the universal.
·
A writer is a person
for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
·
Distance in a
straight line has no mystery. The mystery is in the sphere.
·
Solitude produces
originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces
perverseness, the disproportianate, the absurd and the forbidden.
·
In books we never
find anything but ourselves. Strangely enough, that always gives us great
pleasure, and we say the author is a genius.
·
He who loves the more
is the inferior and must suffer.
·
No man remains quite
what he was when he recognizes himself.
·
This was love at
first sight, love everlasting: a feeling unknown, unhoped for, unexpected--in
so far as it could be a matter of conscious awareness; it took entire
possession of him, and he understood, with joyous amazement, that this was for
life.
·
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.
·
Art is the funnel, as
it were, through which spirit is poured into life.
·
War is only a
cowardly escape from the problems of peace.
·
Tolerance becomes a
crime when applied to evil.
·
Yes, they are carnal,
both of them, love and death, and therein lies their terror and their great
magic!
·
Forbearance in the
face of fate, beauty constant under torture, are not merely passive. They are a
positive achievement, an explicit triumph.
·
He probably was
mediocre after all, though in a very honorable sense of that word.
·
I have always been an
admirer, I regard the gift of admiration as indispensable if one is to amount
to something; I don't know where I would be without it.
·
He thought what a
fine thing it was that people made music all over the world, even in the
strangest settings – probably even on polar expeditions.
·
What pleases the
public is lively and vivid delineation which makes no demands on the intellect;
but passionate and absolutist youth can only be enthralled by a problem.
·
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.
·
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.
·
Thought that can
merge wholly into feeling, feeling that can merge wholly into thought - these
are the artist's highest joy.
·
We do not fear being
called meticulous, inclining as we do to the view that only the exhaustive can
be truly interesting.
·
Is not life in itself
a thing of goodness, irrespective of whether the course it takes for us can be
called a 'happy' one?
·
All interest in
disease and death is only another expression of interest in life.
·
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!
·
Wahrscheinlich kann
man vom Nichtwollen seelisch nicht leben; eine Sache nicht tun wollen, das ist
auf Dauer kein Lebensinhalt.
·
What good would
politics be, if it didn’t give everyone the opportunity to make moral
compromises.
