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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
Better
Harmful
Useful
Lying
Truth

More quotes by Thomas Mann

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…What our age needs, what it demands, what it will create for itself, is—terror.
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Time cools, time clarifies no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours.
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This was love at first sight, love everlasting: a feeling unknown, unhoped for, unexpected--in so far as it could be a matter of conscious awareness it took entire possession of him, and he understood, with joyous amazement, that this was for life.
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Distance in a straight line has no mystery. The mystery is in the sphere.
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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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Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.
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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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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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We do not fear being called meticulous, inclining as we do to the view that only the exhaustive can be truly interesting.
Thomas Mann
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Reduced to a miserable mass level, the level of a Hitler, German Romanticism broke out into hysterical barbarism.
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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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The books and magazines streamed in. He could buy them all, they piled up around him and even while he read, the number of those still to be read disturbed him. … they stood in rows, weighing down his life like a possession which he did not succeed in subordinating to his personality.
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Technology and comfort - having those, people speak of culture, but do not have it.
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A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth.
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I shall need to sleep three weeks on end to get rested from the rest I've had.
Thomas Mann
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(T)here was a story they used to tell at home about a girl whose punishment was that every time she opened her mouth, snakes and toads came out, snakes and toads with every word. The book didn't say what she did about it, but I've always assumed she probably ended up keeping her mouth shut.
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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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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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War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.
Thomas Mann
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He who loves the more is the inferior and must suffer.
Thomas Mann