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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
Individual
Also
Contemporaries
Men
Epoch
Life
Unconsciously
Consciously
Personal
Consciousness
Lives

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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.
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I don't think anyone is thinking long-term now.
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Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportianate, the absurd and the forbidden.
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…What our age needs, what it demands, what it will create for itself, is—terror.
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He probably was mediocre after all, though in a very honorable sense of that word.
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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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What good would politics be, if it didn’t give everyone the opportunity to make moral compromises.
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He who loves the more is the inferior and must suffer.
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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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(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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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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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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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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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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A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
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Distance in a straight line has no mystery. The mystery is in the sphere.
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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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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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