A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth.
Thomas Mann

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

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

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

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

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

All interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life.
Thomas Mann

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

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

But my deepest and most secret love belongs to the fair-haired and the blue-eyed, the bright children of life, the happy, the charming and the ordinary.
Thomas Mann


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

Democracy is timelessly human, and timelessness always implies a certain amount of potential youthfulness.
Thomas Mann

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

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

Everything is politics.
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

For the beautiful word begets the beautiful deed.
Thomas Mann

For the myth is the foundation of life; it is the timeless schema, the pious formula into which life flows when it reproduces its traits out of the unconscious.
Thomas Mann

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

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.
Thomas Mann