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
Speech is civilization itself.
And then the sly arch-lover that he was, he said the subtlest thing of all: that the lover was nearer the divine than the beloved; for the god was in the one but not in the other - perhaps the tenderest, most mocking thought that ever was thought, and source of all the guile and secret bliss the lover knows.
Is not life in itself a thing of goodness, irrespective of whether the course it takes for us can be called a 'happy' one?
Often I have thought of the day when I gazed for the first time at the sea. The sea is vast, the sea is wide, my eyes roved far and wide and longed to be free. But there was the horizon. Why a horizon, when I wanted the infinite from life?
What we call National-Socialism is the poisonous perversion of ideas which have a long history in German intellectual life.
Order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject.
Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.
War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.
It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.
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.
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.
Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportianate, the absurd and the forbidden.
For to be poised against fatality, to meet adverse conditions gracefully, is more than simple endurance; it is an act of aggression, a positive triumph.
Laughter is a sunbeam of the soul.