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 More Quotes by Thomas Mann More Quotes From Thomas Mann As death, when we come to consider it closely, is the true goal of our existence, I have formed during the last few years such close relations with this best and truest friend of mankind, that his image is not only no longer terrifying to me, but is indeed very soothing and consoling And I thank my God for graciously granting me the opportunity...of learning that death is the key which unlocks the door to our true happiness. Thomas Mann Human reason needs only to will more strongly than fate, and she is fate. Thomas Mann I have always been an admirer. I regard the gift of admiration as indispensable if one is to amount to something I don't know where I would be without it. Thomas Mann It is impossible for ideas to compete in the marketplace if no forum for their presentation is provided or available. Thomas Mann Opinions cannot survive if one has no chance to fight for them. Thomas Mann Order and simplification are the first steps towards the mastery of a subject. Thomas Mann The meeting in the open of two dogs, strangers to each other, is one of the most painful, thrilling, and pregnant of all conceivable encounters; it is surrounded by an atmosphere of the last canniness, presided over by a constraint for which I have no precise name; they simply cannot pass each other, their mutual embarrassment is frightful to behold. Thomas Mann We, when we sow the seeds of doubt deeper than the most up-to-date and modish free-thought has ever dreamed of doing, we well know what we are about. Only out of radical skeptics, out of moral chaos, can the Absolute spring, the anointed Terror of which the time has need. Thomas Mann What is uttered is finished and done with. Thomas Mann 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 you company path beauty Only he who desires is amiable and not he who is satiated. Thomas Mann desires only he who 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 man always stupid clever 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 equality democracy freedom society The only religious way to think of death is as part and parcel of life. Thomas Mann think life death way 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 she saying music nature 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 will language life art
