Thomas Mann Quotes on Life (11 Quotes)

And for its part, what was life? Was it perhaps only an infectious disease of matterùjust as the so-called spontaneous generation of matter was perhaps only an illness, a cancerous stimulation of the immaterial?

But was it not true that there were people, certain individuals, whom one found it impossible to picture dead, precisely because they were so vulgar? That was to say: they seemed so fit for life, so good at it, that they would never die, as if they were unworthy of the consecration of death.

It is remarkable how a man cannot summarize his thoughts in even the most general sort of way without betraying himself completely, without putting his whole self into it, quite unawares, presenting as if in allegory the basic themes and problems of his life.

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.

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.

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

All interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life.

A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.

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.

What we call National-Socialism is the poisonous perversion of ideas which have a long history in German intellectual life.

I never can understand how anyone can not smoke it deprives a man of the best part of life. With a good cigar in his mouth a man is perfectly safe, nothing can touch him, literally.