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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

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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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War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.
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A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth.
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A harmful truth is better than a useful lie.
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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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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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A man’s dying is more the survivors’ affair than his own.
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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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Reduced to a miserable mass level, the level of a Hitler, German Romanticism broke out into hysterical barbarism.
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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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I shall need to sleep three weeks on end to get rested from the rest I've had.
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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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Time cools, time clarifies no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours.
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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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Speech is civilization itself.
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…What our age needs, what it demands, what it will create for itself, is—terror.
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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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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.
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All interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in 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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