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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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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
Well
Sometimes
Love
Defects
Life
Qualities
Quality
Persons
Reason
Wells

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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.
Thomas Mann
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Speech is civilization itself.
Thomas Mann
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He probably was mediocre after all, though in a very honorable sense of that word.
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.
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A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.
Thomas Mann
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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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Technology and comfort - having those, people speak of culture, but do not have it.
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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A man’s dying is more the survivors’ affair than his own.
Thomas Mann
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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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One must die to life in order to be utterly a creator.
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.
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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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War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.
Thomas Mann
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A harmful truth is better than a useful lie.
Thomas Mann
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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.
Thomas Mann
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I don't think anyone is thinking long-term now.
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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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