Quotes by Thomas Mann

Thomas Mann

German Author, Critic

Alive from: 1875-1955

Quotes 1 till 15 of 15.

• Thomas Mann

  

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  You ask what is the use of classification, arrangement, systemization? I answer you: order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject-the actual enemy is the unknown.

• Thomas Mann

  

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  An art whose medium is language will always show a high degree of critical creativeness, for speech is itself a critique of life: it names, it characterizes, it passes judgment, in that it creates.

• Thomas Mann

  

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  Every reasonable human being should be a moderate Socialist.

• Thomas Mann

  

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  Extraordinary creature! So close a friend, and yet so remote.

• Thomas Mann

  

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  Human reason needs only to will more strongly than fate, and she is fate.

• Thomas Mann

  

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  I have always been an admirer. I regard the gift of admiration as indispensable if one is to amount to something; I don't know where I would be without it.

• Thomas Mann

  

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  If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it.

• Thomas Mann

  

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  It is a strange fact that freedom and equality, the two basic ideas of democracy, are to some extent contradictory. Logically considered, freedom and equality are mutually exclusive, just as society and the individual are mutually exclusive.

• Thomas Mann

  

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  Opinions cannot survive if one has no chance to fight for them.

• Thomas Mann

  

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  Order and simplification are the first steps towards the mastery of a subject.

• Thomas Mann

  

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  Speech is civilization itself. The word... preserves contact - it is silence which isolates.

• Thomas Mann

  

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  The only religious way to think of death is as part and parcel of life.

• Thomas Mann

  

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  There is something suspicious about music, gentlemen. I insist that she is, by her nature, equivocal. I shall not be going too far in saying at once that she is politically suspect.

• Thomas Mann

  

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  We, when we sow the seeds of doubt deeper than the most up-to-date and modish free-thought has ever dreamed of doing, we well know what we are about. Only out of radical skeptics, out of moral chaos, can the Absolute spring, the anointed Terror of which the time has need.

• Thomas Mann

  

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  What is uttered is finished and done with.