Thomas Mann
Thomas Mann
Paul Thomas Mannwas a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and the 1929 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate. His highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and novellas are noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual. His 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...
NationalityGerman
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth6 June 1875
CityLubeck, Germany
CountryGermany
A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth.
Innate in nearly every artistic nature is a wanton, treacherous penchant for accepting injustice when it creates beauty and showing sympathy for and paying homage to aristocratic privilege.
Distance in a straight line has no mystery. The mystery is in the sphere.
No man remains quite what he was when he recognizes himself.
A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.
All interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life.
I never can understand how anyone can not smoke it deprives a man of the best part of life. With a good cigar in his mouth a man is perfectly safe, nothing can touch him, literally.
He who loves the more is the inferior and must suffer.
Technology and comfort - having those, people speak of culture, but do not have it.
People's behavior makes sense if you think about it in terms of their goals, needs, and motives.
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!
The observations and encounters of a devotee of solitude and silence are at once less distinct and more penetrating than those of the sociable man; his thoughts are weightier, stranger, and never without a tinge of sadness. Images and perceptions which might otherwise be easily dispelled by a glance, a laugh, an exchange of comments, concern him unduly, they sink into mute depths, take on significance, become experiences, adventures, emotions.
I don't think anyone is thinking long-term now.
We do not fear being called meticulous, inclining as we do to the view that only the exhaustive can be truly interesting.