For to be poised against fatality, to meet adverse conditions gracefully, is more than simple endurance; it is an act of aggression, a positive triumph. - Thomas Mann
One always has the idea of a stupid man as perfectly healthy and ordinary, and of illness as making one refined and clever and unusual. - Thomas Mann
Reduced to a miserable mass level, the level of a Hitler, German Romanticism broke out into hysterical barbarism. - Thomas Mann
For the myth is the foundation of life; it is the timeless schema, the pious formula into which life flows when it reproduces its traits out of the unconscious. - Thomas Mann
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
But my deepest and most secret love belongs to the fair-haired and the blue-eyed, the bright children of life, the happy, the charming and the ordinary. - Thomas Mann
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
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
People's behavior makes sense if you think about it in terms of their goals, needs, and motives. - Thomas Mann