Thomas Mann Quotes & Sayings

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

“Order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject.”

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

“It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.”

“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.”

“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.”

“What a wonderful phenomenon it is, carefully considered, when the human eye, that jewel of organic structures, concentrates its moist brilliance on another human creature!”

“Time has no divisions to mark its passage, there is never a thunder-storm or blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year. Even when a new century begins it is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols.”

“War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.”

“Every reasonable human being should be a moderate Socialist.”