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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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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
Life
Unconsciously
Consciously
Personal
Consciousness
Lives
Individual
Also
Contemporaries
Men
Epoch

More quotes by Thomas Mann

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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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What good would politics be, if it didn’t give everyone the opportunity to make moral compromises.
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A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
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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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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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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
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All interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life.
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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(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 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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He who loves the more is the inferior and must suffer.
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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…What our age needs, what it demands, what it will create for itself, is—terror.
Thomas Mann
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Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.
Thomas Mann
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War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.
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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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.
Thomas Mann
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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.
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.
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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.
Thomas Mann