Thomas Mann

For the beautiful word begets the beautiful deed.

...Art is the spirit in matter, the natural instinct toward humanization, that is, toward the spiritualization of life.

What a glorious gift is imagination, and what satisfaction it affords!

For the sake of goodness and love, Man shall let Death have No sovereignty over his thoughts.

Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But it also gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.

A man's dying is more the survivors' affair than his own.

A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a great truth.

I tell them that if they will occupy themselves with the study of mathematics they will find in it the best remedy against the lusts of the flesh.

Some of the men stood talking in this room, and at the right of the door a little knot had formed round a small table, the center of which was the mathematics student, who ws eagerly talking. He had made the assertion that one could draw through a given point more than one parallel to a straight line; Frau Hagenström had cried out that this was impossible, and he had gone on to prove it so conclusively that his hearers were constrained to behave as though they understood.

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