17 Inspiring Thomas Mann Quotes

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Discover 17 inspiring Thomas Mann quotes about life, relationships, literature, art, and more from his books and essays.

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Who is the writer Thomas Mann?

Thomas Mann is a famous German novelist who earned the Nobel Prize 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 when 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. From there, he settled in the United States, where he first settledin Princeton, New Jersey, and later in California. In 1952 he returned to Switzerland, where he died in 1955.

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Thomas Mann books

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, there is an 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 failure to meet formal education demands. 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.

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Inspiring Thomas Mann Quotes

About Love

Here are some beautiful quotes by Thomas Mann about love:

• “It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.”
• “This was love at first sight, love everlasting: a feeling unknown, unhoped for, unexpected–in so far as it could be a matter of conscious awareness; it took entire possession of him, and he understood, with joyous amazement, that this was for life.”
• “We don’t love qualities, we love persons; sometimes because of their defects as well as of their qualities.”
• “If love is the best thing in life, then the best part of love is the kiss.”

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About Art and Writing

• “Order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject — the actual enemy is the unknown.” The Magic Mountain
• “A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” Essays of Three Decades
• “There are so many different kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst.” The Magic Mountain
• “Art is the funnel, as it were, through which spirit is poured into life.”

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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, characterizes, it passes judgment, in that it creates.”
• “Speech is civilization itself. The word, even the most contradictory word, preserves contact—it is silence that isolates.”
• “If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it.” Tonio Kröger
• “In books, we never find anything but ourselves. Strangely enough, that always gives us great pleasure, and we say the author is a genius.”
• “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.” Death in Venice and Other Tales

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More Inspiring Thomas Mann Quotes

• “A harmful truth is better than a useful lie.” The Magic Mountain
• “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?”
• “…nearly everything great owes its existence to “despites”: despite misery and affliction, poverty, desolation, physical debility, vice, passion, and a thousand other obstacles.” 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.” The Magic Mountain

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