Thomas Mann

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“One has the idea of a stupid man as perfectly healthy and ordinary, and of illness as making one refined and clever and unusual.”

“Respectable means rich, and decent means poor. I should die if I heard my family called decent.”

“I shall need to sleep three weeks on end to get rested from the rest I've had.”

“A man's dying is more his survivor's affair than his own.”

“Democracy is timelessly human, and timelessness always implies a certain amount of potential youthfulness.”

“What is uttered is finished and done with.”