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My favorite Thomas Mann quotes

Last Updated on 06/04/2023

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Discover my favorite Thomas Mann quotes that are interesting and so inspiring about life, relationships, literature, art, and more from his books and essays.

Thomas Mann is a famous German novelist that earned the Nobel Price in Literature in 1929. He was born in Lübeck in 1875 and he was the son of a wealthy merchant. And, he attended rigorous schools and joined an insurance company in Munich at the age of nineteen. There, he secretly wrote his first short story. This was the time that he left his position to study art and literature at university. Afterward, he devoted his life to writing.

Thomas Mann left for Switzerland in 1933. And from there to the United States, where he settled, first in Princeton, New Jersey, and later in California. In 1952 he returned to Switzerland, where he died in 1955.



His most known works are Buddenbrooks, Doctor Faustus, Death in Venice, and The Magic Mountain. With his books, he accurately records the trends of his time. Objectivity, insistence on detail, and a subtle irony characterize his writings. Also, he analyzes the nature of humanity, the anxieties of maturity, the role of art, the fear of death, and other important subjects.

Moreover, I find remarkable his autobiographical note for the volume of “Les Prix Nobel series” that he wrote in October 1930. In this text, he confessed his hate for school and his failure to meet the demands of formal education. Also, he described how he learned to fight with difficulty this internal resistance. And, in the end, he admits that he acquired all his knowledge and education in a free and self-taught way.

My 10 Thomas Mann fav quotes

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My favorite Thomas Mann quotes 


“A harmful truth is better than a useful lie.”

– Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

“Order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject — the actual enemy is the unknown.” 

– Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
My 10 Thomas Mann fav quotes

“A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” 

– Thomas Mann, Essays of Three Decades

“There are so many different kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst.”

– Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

“Art is the funnel, as it were, through which spirit is poured into life.”

– Thomas Mann
"Art is the funnel, as it were, through which spirit is poured into life."  Thomas Mann - My favorite Thomas Mann quotes

“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, characterizes, it passes judgment, in that it creates.”

– Thomas Mann

“Speech is civilization itself. The word, even the most contradictory word, preserves contact—it is silence that isolates.”

– Thomas Mann

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

– Thomas Mann, Tonio Kröger


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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, Death in Venice and Other Tales

“Often I have thought of the day when I gazed for the first time at the sea. The sea is vast, the sea is wide, my eyes roved far and wide and longed to be free. But there was the horizon. Why a horizon, when I wanted the infinite from life?”

– Thomas Mann

“…nearly everything great owes its existence to “despites”: despite misery and affliction, poverty, desolation, physical debility, vice, passion, and a thousand other obstacles.

– Thomas Mann, Death in Venice


Time drowns in the unmeasured monotony of space. Where uniformity reigns, movement from point to point is no longer movement; and where movement is no longer movement, there is no time.”

– Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

“In books, we never find anything but ourselves. Strangely enough, that always gives us great pleasure, and we say the author is a genius.”

– Thomas Mann

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