A harmful truth is better than a useful lie.
- Thomas Mann Quote

A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.
- Thomas Mann Quote

A man's dying is more his survivor's affair than his own.
- Thomas Mann Quote

A solitary, unused to speaking of what he sees and feels, has mental experiences which are at once more intense and less articulate than those of a gregarious man.
- Thomas Mann Quote

A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
- Thomas Mann Quote

An art whose medium is language will always show a high degree of critical creativeness, for speech is itself a critique of life: it names, it characterizes, it passes judgment, in that it creates.
- Thomas Mann Quote

Animals do not admire each other. A horse does not admire its companion.
- Thomas Mann Quote

Culture and possessions, there is the bourgeoisie for you.
- Thomas Mann Quote

Disease makes men more physical, it leaves them nothing but body.
- Thomas Mann Quote

Every reasonable human being should be a moderate Socialist.
- Thomas Mann Quote

For I must tell you that we artists cannot tread the path of Beauty without Eros keeping company with us and appointing himself as our guide.
- Thomas Mann Quote

For the beautiful word begets the beautiful deed.
- Thomas Mann Quote

For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts.
- Thomas Mann Quote

Has the world ever been changed by anything save the thought and its magic vehicle the Word?
- Thomas Mann Quote

Human reason needs only to will more strongly than fate, and she is fate.
- Thomas Mann Quote

I don't think anyone is thinking long-term now.
- Thomas Mann Quote

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.
- Thomas Mann Quote

I shall need to sleep three weeks on end to get rested from the rest I've had.
- Thomas Mann Quote

If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it.
- Thomas Mann Quote

It is a strange fact that freedom and equality, the two basic ideas of democracy, are to some extent contradictory. Logically considered, freedom and equality are mutually exclusive, just as society and the individual are mutually exclusive.
- Thomas Mann Quote

Literature... is the union of suffering with the instinct for form.
- Thomas Mann Quote

One always has the idea of a stupid man as perfectly healthy and ordinary, and of illness as making one refined and clever and unusual.
- Thomas Mann Quote

One must die to life in order to be utterly a creator.
- Thomas Mann Quote

Only he who desires is amiable and not he who is satiated.
- Thomas Mann Quote

Order and simplification are the first steps toward mastery of a subject - the actual enemy is the unknown.
- Thomas Mann Quote

People's behavior makes sense if you think about it in terms of their goals, needs, and motives.
- Thomas Mann Quote

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

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 Quote

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

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

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 Quote

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 Quote

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

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 Quote