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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

More quotes by 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.
Thomas Mann
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What good would politics be, if it didn’t give everyone the opportunity to make moral compromises.
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.
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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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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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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.
Thomas Mann
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…What our age needs, what it demands, what it will create for itself, is—terror.
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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All interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life.
Thomas Mann
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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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Has the world ever been changed by anything save the thought and its magic vehicle the Word?
Thomas Mann
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Time cools, time clarifies no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours.
Thomas Mann
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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.
Thomas Mann
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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.
Thomas Mann
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He who loves the more is the inferior and must suffer.
Thomas Mann
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Reduced to a miserable mass level, the level of a Hitler, German Romanticism broke out into hysterical barbarism.
Thomas Mann
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Speech is civilization itself.
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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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.
Thomas Mann
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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.
Thomas Mann