“In effect it seemed to him that, though honor might possess certain advantages, yet shame had others, and not inferior: advantages, even, that were well-nigh boundless in their scope.”

Thomas Mann
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Shame
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“The purifying, healing influence of literature, the dissipating of passions by knowledge and the written word, literature as the path to understanding, forgiveness and love, the redeeming might of the word, the literary spirit as the noblest manifestation of the spirit of man, the writer as perfected type, as saint.”

Thomas Mann
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Literature
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“Love as a force contributory to disease.”

Thomas Mann
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Sex
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“All moral discipline, all moral perfection derived from the soul of literature.”

Thomas Mann
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Morality
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“Why does almost everything seem to me like its own parody? Why must I think that almost all, no, all the methods and conventions of art today are good for parody only?”

Thomas Mann
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Art
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“Never had he felt the joy of the word more sweetly, never had he known so clearly that Eros dwells in language.”

Thomas Mann
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Art
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“He was all for catharsis and purification, he dreamed of an aesthetic consecration that should cleanse society of luxury, the greed of gold and all unloveliness.”

Thomas Mann
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Art
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“Politics has been called the “art of the possible,” and it actually is a realm akin to art insofar as, like art, it occupies a creatively mediating position between spirit and life, the idea and reality.”

Thomas Mann
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Art
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“This longing for the bliss of the commonplace.”

Thomas Mann
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Art
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“Because it often happens that an old family, with traditions that are entirely practical, sober and bourgeois, undergoes in its declining days a kind of artistic transfiguration.”

Thomas Mann
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Art
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“Beer, tobacco, and music,” he went on. “Behold the Fatherland.”

Thomas Mann
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Music
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“Hans Castorp loved music from his heart; it worked upon him much the same way as did his breakfast porter, with deeply soothing, narcotic effect, tempting him to doze.”

Thomas Mann
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Music
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“My aversion from music rests on political grounds.”

Thomas Mann
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Music
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“It had been a moving, tranquil apotheosis, immersed in the transfiguring sunset glow of decline and decay and extinction. An old family, already grown too weary and too noble for life and action, had reached the end of its history, and its last utterances were sounds of music: a few violin notes, full of the sad insight which is ripeness for death.”

Thomas Mann
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Music
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“The Germans are always too late. They are late, like music, which is always the last of the arts to express a world condition,–when that world condition is already in its final stages. They are abstract and mystical.”

Thomas Mann
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Music
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“There is something suspicious about music, gentlemen. I insist that she is, by her nature, equivocal. I shall not be going too farin saying at once that she is politically suspect.”

Thomas Mann
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Music
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“Was it an intellectual consequence of this ‘rebirth,’ of this new dignity and rigor, that, at about the same time, his sense of beauty was observed to undergo an almost excessive resurgence, that his style took on the noble purity, simplicity and symmetry that were to set upon all his subsequent works that so evident and evidently intentional stamp of the classical master.”

Thomas Mann
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Beauty
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“For I must tell you that we artists cannot tread the path of Beauty without Eros keeping company with us and appointing himself asour guide.”

Thomas Mann
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Beauty
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“With astonishment Aschenbach noticed that the boy was entirely beautiful. His countenance, pale and gracefully reserved, was surrounded by ringlets of honey-colored hair, and with its straight nose, its enchanting mouth, its expression of sweet and divine gravity, it recalled Greek sculpture of the noblest period.”

Thomas Mann
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Beauty
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“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!”

Thomas Mann
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Beauty