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
Thomas Mann quotes about
It is most certainly a good thing that the world knows only the beautiful opus but not its origins, not the conditions of its creation; for if people knew the sources of the artist's inspiration, that knowledge would often confuse them, alarm them, and thereby destroy the effects of excellence. strange hours! strangely enervating labor! bizarrely fertile intercourse of the mind with a body!
There were profound reasons for his attachment to the sea: he loved it because as a hardworking artist he needed rest, needed to escape from the demanding complexity of phenomena and lie hidden on the bosom of the simple and tremendous; because of a forbidden longing deep within him that ran quite contrary to his life's task and was for that very reason seductive, a longing for the unarticulated and immeasurable, for eternity, for nothingness. To rest in the arms of perfection is the desire of any man intent upon creating excellence; and is not nothingness a form of perfection?
Thought that can merge wholly into feeling, feeling that can merge wholly into thought - these are the artist's highest joy.
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.
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.
It was not quite the finale that the president and the Republican leadership had in mind.
Apart from the presidential contest, Republicans have an advantage in the Senate because they are defending fewer seats in more hospitable territory.
Third, the overall support for the President does not extend to specific dimensions of his job performance beyond national security.
Do you know how many times campaign-finance reform failed before final passage in 2002? Many times.
Bush's partisan style of governance has reinforced it.
Separation would likely do more harm than good for congressional Republicans. They need to try to rehabilitate the president's political standing, which will have a large bearing on the size of their seat loss in 2006.
They feel emboldened in a way that they weren't after 9-11. They see that their criticisms help shape public opinion and they are emboldened by seeing erosion in the Republican Party unity.
This president, in particular, tends to be very much opposed to members of his administration being forced out of office by others. In his view, it amounts to a sign of culpability on the president's part.
This is the ugliest period in our politics in many decades, ... tribalism.