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
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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
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What we call National-Socialism is the poisonous perversion of ideas which have a long history in German intellectual life.Thomas Mann
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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
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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
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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
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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
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We don't love qualities, we love persons; sometimes by reason of their defects as well as of their qualities.Thomas Mann
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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
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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
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Democracy is timelessly human, and timelessness always implies a certain amount of potential youthfulness.Thomas Mann
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For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts.Thomas Mann
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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
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The writer's joy is the thought that can become emotion, the emotion that can wholly become a thought.Thomas Mann
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One 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
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The Freudian theory is one of the most important foundation stones for an edifice to be built by future generations, the dwelling of a freer and wiser humanity.Thomas Mann
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Respectable means rich, and decent means poor. I should die if I heard my family called decent.Thomas Mann
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