Quote

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

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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
Lose
Endorse
Respect
Forfeit
Loses
Complacency
Opinion
Misfortune
Self
Betray
Real
Misfortunes
Good
Contempt
World
Oneself
Unhesitatingly

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Time cools, time clarifies no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours.
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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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A harmful truth is better than a useful lie.
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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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Has the world ever been changed by anything save the thought and its magic vehicle the Word?
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All interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life.
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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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He who loves the more is the inferior and must suffer.
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War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.
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Thought that can merge wholly into feeling, feeling that can merge wholly into thought - these are the artist's highest joy.
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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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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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(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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