Thomas Mann

People's behavior makes sense if you think about it in terms of their goals, needs, and motives.

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.

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

The task of a writer consists of being able to make something out of an idea.

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

For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts.

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

We don't love qualities, we love persons; sometimes by reason of their defects as well as of their qualities.

He who loves the more is the inferior and must suffer.

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.

A solitary, unused to speaking of what he sees and feels, has mental experiences which are at once more intense and less articulate than those of a gregarious man.

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