Thomas Mann

Everything is politics.

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.

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.

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.

There is only one real misfortune: to forfeit one's own good opinion of oneself. Lose your complacency, once betray your own self-contempt and the world will unhesitatingly endorse it.

Speech is civilization itself. The word even the most contradictory word preserves contact - it is silence which isolates.

No man remains quite what he was when he recognizes himself.

What the collective age wants allows and approves is the perpetual holiday from the self.

Human reason needs only to will more strongly than fate and she is fate.

A human being who is first of all an invalid is all body therein lies his inhumanity and his debasement.

He who loves the more is the inferior and must suffer.

It is love not reason that is stronger than death.

If you are possessed by an idea you find it expressed everywhere you even smell it.

Habituation is a falling asleep or fatiguing of the sense of time which explains why young years pass slowly while later life flings itself faster and faster upon its course.

Time cools time clarifies no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours.

A man's dying is more the survivors' affair than his own.

Speech is civilization itself.

[Men] act in response to an outward situation, and on being presented with an opportunity to conform to a pattern. If the pattern gives licence to cruelty, so much the better. They take advantage of the licence so thoughtlessly, so thoroughly, that it becomes perfectly clear: the generality of mankind are only waiting for the chance, only waiting for outward circumstance to sanction brutality and allow them to be cruel and brutal to their heart's content.