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A harmful truth is better than a useful lie.

Thomas Mann

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Thomas Mann
Age: 80 †
Born: 1875
Born: June 6
Died: 1955
Died: August 12
Autobiographer
Diarist
Essayist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Short Story Writer
Social Critic
University Teacher
Writer
Hanseatic City of Lübeck
Perreo
Harmful
Useful
Lying
Truth
Better

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And then the sly arch-lover that he was, he said the subtlest thing of all: that the lover was nearer the divine than the beloved for the god was in the one but not in the other - perhaps the tenderest, most mocking thought that ever was thought, and source of all the guile and secret bliss the lover knows.
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Speech is civilization itself.
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A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
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I shall need to sleep three weeks on end to get rested from the rest I've had.
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He probably was mediocre after all, though in a very honorable sense of that word.
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What good would politics be, if it didn’t give everyone the opportunity to make moral compromises.
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It is remarkable how a man cannot summarize his thoughts in even the most general sort of way without betraying himself completely, without putting his whole self into it, quite unawares, presenting as if in allegory the basic themes and problems of his life.
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Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportianate, the absurd and the forbidden.
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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.
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Thought that can merge wholly into feeling, feeling that can merge wholly into thought - these are the artist's highest joy.
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We do not fear being called meticulous, inclining as we do to the view that only the exhaustive can be truly interesting.
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I tell them that if they will occupy themselves with the study of mathematics they will find in it the best remedy against the lusts of the flesh.
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Innate in nearly every artistic nature is a wanton, treacherous penchant for accepting injustice when it creates beauty and showing sympathy for and paying homage to aristocratic privilege.
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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.
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Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.
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We don't love qualities, we love persons sometimes by reason of their defects as well as of their qualities.
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He took in the squeaky music, the vulgar and pining melodies, because passion immobilizes good taste and seriously considers what soberly would be thought of as funny and to be resented.
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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.
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A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth.
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One must die to life in order to be utterly a creator.
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