Thomas Mann

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

The writer's joy is the thought that can become emotion, the emotion that can wholly become a thought.

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

For I must tell you that we artists cannot tread the path of Beauty without Eros keeping company with us and appointing himself as our guide.

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.

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.

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!

Human reason needs only to will more strongly than fate, and she is fate.

Every reasonable human being should be a moderate Socialist.

Time cools, time clarifies; no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours.

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.

The Freudian theory is one of the most important foundation stones for an edifice to be built by future generations, the dwelling of a freer and wiser humanity.