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

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

Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.
Thomas Mann

Speech is civilization itself.
Thomas Mann

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.
Thomas Mann

The only religious way to think of death is as part and parcel of life.
Thomas Mann

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

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

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.
Thomas Mann

Time cools, time clarifies; no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours.
Thomas Mann

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.
Thomas Mann

War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.
Thomas Mann

We don't love qualities, we love persons; sometimes by reason of their defects as well as of their qualities.
Thomas Mann

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!
Thomas Mann

What is uttered is finished and done with.
Thomas Mann

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