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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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Distance in a straight line has no mystery. The mystery is in the sphere.
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For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts.
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What we call National-Socialism is the poisonous perversion of ideas which have a long history in German intellectual life.
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He thought what a fine thing it was that people made music all over the world, even in the strangest settings – probably even on polar expeditions.
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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.
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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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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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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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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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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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Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.
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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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One has the idea of a stupid man as perfectly healthy and ordinary, and of illness as making one refined and clever and unusual.
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A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth.
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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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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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He probably was mediocre after all, though in a very honorable sense of that word.
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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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I shall need to sleep three weeks on end to get rested from the rest I've had.
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