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Thomas Mann

Thomas Mann Biography

Novelist

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“Thought that can merge wholly into feeling, feeling that can merge wholly into thought—these are the artist's highest joy. And our solitary protagonist felt in himself at this moment power to command and wield a thought that thrilled with emotion, an emotion as precise and concentrated as thought: namely, that nature herself shivers with ecstasy when the mind bows down in homage before beauty.”

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Book:Death in Venice & Seven Other Stories
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“His games have a deeper meaning and fascination that adults can no longer fathom and require nothing more than three pebbles, or a piece of wood with a dandelion helmet, perhaps; but above all they require only the pure, strong, passionate, chaste, still-untroubled fantasy of those happy years when life still hesitates to touch us, when neither duty nor guilt dares lay a hand upon us, when we are allowed to see, hear, laugh, wonder, and dream without the world's demanding anything in return, when the impatience of those whom we want so much to love has not yet begun to torment us for evidence, some early token, that we will diligently fulfill our duties. Ah, it will not be long, and all that will rain down upon us in overwhelming, raw power, will assault us, stretch us, cramp us, drill us, corrupt us.”

LoveImaginationWonderGrowing UpYouthDutyInnocenceDecline Adulthood
Book:Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family
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“Is not every human being a mistake, a product of misunderstanding? No sooner is he born than he is thrust into a prison. Prison! Prison! Chains and walls everywhere! Through the barred windows of his individuality, a person hopelessly gazes at the ramparts of external circumstances until death calls him home to freedom... Individuality! Ah, what we are, what we can do and have, seems to us paltry, gray, insufficient, and dull; but what we are not, what we cannot do, what we do not have, we regard with envious longing that turns into love—if only out of fear that it will turn into hatred.”

IndividualityExistential
Book:Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family
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“Was not every human being a mistake, a blunder? Did we not, at the very moment of birth, stumble into agonizing captivity? A prison, a prison with bars and chains everywhere! And, staring out hopelessly from between the bars of his individuality, a man sees only the surrounding walls of external circumstance, until death comes and calls him home to freedom. Individuality! Oh, what a man is, can, and has seems to him so poor, gray, inadequate, and boring. But what a man is not, cannot, and does not have—he gazes at all that with longing envy—envy that turns to love, because he fears it will turn to hate.”

ExistenceIndividuality
Book:Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family
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“I bear within me the seed, the rudiments, the possibility of life's capacities and endeavors. Where might I be, if I were not here? Who, what, how could I be, if I were not me, if this outward appearance that is me did not encase me, separating my consciousness from that of others who are not me? An organism—a blind, rash, pitiful eruption of the insistent assertion of the will. Far better, really, if that will were to drift free in a night without time or space, than to languish in a prison cell lit only by the flickering, uncertain flame of the intellect.”

DeathIndividualityCatholicismWillProtestantismSchopenhauer
Book:Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family
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“ვნება სიცოცხლისთვის სიცოცხლეს ნიშნავს, მამაკაცები კი განცდის გულისთვის ცოცხლობთ. ვნება თავდავიწყებაა, თქვენ კი მხოლოდ თვითგამდიდრების ჟინი გკლავთ. C’est ça. ნუთუ არც გიფიქრიათ, რომ ეს საზიზღარი ეგოიზმია და მისი წყალობით ერთ მშვენიერ დღეს კაცობრიობის მტრის როლში აღმოჩნდებით?”

Passion
Book:The Magic Mountain
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“Nein, die Schule hat keinen bestimmenden Einfluss auf meine Entwicklung gehabt. Die Schule hat von meinen besonderen Anlagen wohl instinktiv etwas gespürt, sie aber als obstinate Untauglichkeit gewertet und verworfen. Ein Lehrer drohte, zufällig nicht mir, sondern einem anderen Schüler, mit den Worten: "Ich werde dir deine Karriere schon verderben!" Am gleichen Tag las ich bei Storm den Spruch: "Was du immer kannst, zu werden, scheue Arbeit nicht und Wachen, aber hüte deine Seele vor dem Karrieremachen.”

SchoolWorkEducationAmbitionEmpowermentWritersDedicationCareerGiftsTalentsCritical ThinkingIndependent Thought
Book:Über mich selbst: Autobiographische Schriften
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“What did one see if one looked in any depth into the world of this writer's fiction? Elegant self-control concealing from the world's eyes until the very last moment a state of inner disintegration and biological decay; sallow ugliness, sensuously marred and worsted, which nevertheless is able to fan its smouldering concupiscence to a pallid impotence, which from the glowing depths of the spirit draws strength to cast down a whole proud people at the foot of the Cross and set its own foot upon them as well; gracious poise and composure in the empty austere service of form; the false, dangerous life of the born deceiver, his ambition and his art which lead so soon to exhaustion ---”

ArtFormFictionDeceitWritersDecay
Book:Death in Venice and Other Tales
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“I know from life and from history something you have not thought of: often the outward, visible, material signs and symbols of happiness and success only show themselves when the process of decline has already set in. The outer manifestations take time - like the light of that start up there which may in reality already be quenched when it looks to us to be shining at its brightest.”

HappinessBeautyDecline
Book:Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family
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“Children of sin are we all. But to me it often seems as though a contradiction were in the world between sinfulness and high courage, between the wretchedness of the flesh and its pride. If it be corrupt, how then can it gaze free and bold and brace itself to such a noble gait that it fills with pride even the beholder? The spirit is ware of our unworth, yet unconcerned with its knowledge Nature considers herself worthy.”

Sin
Book:The Holy Sinner
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“We do not like final knowledge, because knowledge, Phaedo, has no dignity or severity: it knows, understands, forgives, without attitude; it is sympathetic to the abyss, it is the abyss. Therefore we deny it and instead seek beauty, simplicity, greatness and severity, of objectivity and form. But form and objectivity, Phaedo, lead the noble one to intoxication and desire, to horrible emotional transgressions rejected by his beautiful severity, lead to the abyss. Us poets, I say, it leads there, for we are unable to elevate ourselves, instead we can only transgress.”

BeautyKnowledgePoets
Book:Death in Venice
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“Naphta loathed the bourgeois state and its love of security. He found occasion to express this loathing one autumn afternoon when, as they were walking along the main street, it suddenly began to rain and, as if on command, there was an umbrella over every head. That was a symbol of cowardice and vulgar effeminacy, the end product of civilization. An incident like the sinking of the Titanic was atavistic, true, but its effect was most refreshing, it was the handwriting on the wall. Afterward, of course, came the hue and cry for more security in shipping. How pitiful, but such weak-willed humanitarianism squared very nicely with the wolfish cruelty and villainy of slaughter on the economic battlefield known as the bourgeois state. War, war ! He was all for it – the universal lust for war seemed quite honorable in comparison.”

WarSecurityCowardiceBourgeoisUmbrellas
Book:The Magic Mountain
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“That time will have come when our prison, which though extensive is nonetheless cramped and filled with suffocatingly stale air, has opened-that is, when the war raging at present has come to an end, one way or the other. And how that "or the other" sets me in terror of both myself and the awful straits into which fate has squeezed the German heart! For in fact I have only "the other" in mind; I am relying on it, counting solely on it, against my conscience as a citizen. After all, never-failing public indoctrination has made sure that we are profoundly aware of the crushing consequences, in all their irrevocable horror, of a German defeat, so that we cannot help fearing it more than anything else in the world. And yet there is something that some of us fear-at certain moments that seem criminal even to ourselves, whereas others fear it quite frankly and permanently-fear more than a German defeat, and that is a German victory. I hardly dare ask myself to which of these two persuasions I belong. Perhaps to a third, in which one yearns for defeat constantly and consciously, but with unrelenting agony of conscience.”

WarGermanyWw2
Book:Doctor Faustus
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“Cases of typhoid take the following course: When the fever is at its height, life calls out to the patient: calls out to him as he wanders in his distant dream, and summons him in no uncertain voice. The harsh, imperious call reaches the spirit on that remote path that leads into the shadows, the coolness and peace. He hears the call of life, the clear, fresh, mocking summons to return to that distant scene which he had already left so far behind him, and already forgotten. And there may well up in him something like a feeling of same for a neglected duty; a sense of renewed energy, courage, and hope; he may recognize a bond existing still between him and that stirring, colourful, callous existence which he thought he had left so far behind him. Then, how far he may have wandered on his distant path, he will turn back--and live. But if he shudders when he hears life's voice, if the memory of that vanished scene and the sound of that lusty summons make him shake his head, make him put out his hand to ward off as he flies forward in the way of escape that has opened to him--then it is clear that the patient will die. " Buddenbrooks”

LifeDeathNovelGermanTyphoidMannBuddenbrooksHanno
Author:Thomas Mann
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“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. They are sluggish, yet more wayward, and never without a melancholy tinge. Sights and impressions which others brush aside with a glance, a light comment, a smile, occupy him more than their due; they sink silently in, they take on meaning, they become experience, emotion, adventure. 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.”

Solitude
Book:Death in Venice and Other Tales
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“A magányban némán szemlélődőnek megfigyelései elmosódottabbak s mégis élesebbek, mint a társas emberéi, gondolatai súlyosabbak, különösebbek, és mindig van bennük leheletnyi bú. Képek, benyomások, amelyeket egy pillantással, nevetéssel, egy eszmecserével könnyedén el lehetne intézni, mértéken felül foglalkoztatják, elmélyülnek a hallgatásban, jelentőséget kapnak, élmény, kaland, érzés lesz belőlük. Magány termi az eredetiséget, a merészen, meghökkentően szépet, a költeményt. Ámde a magány termi a fonákot, az aránytalant, az abszurdot és a tilalmat is.”

SolitudeAbsurdOriginality
Book:Death in Venice
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“He surrendered utterly to the power that to him seemed the highest on earth, to whose service he felt called, which promised him elevation and honours: the power of intellect, the power of the Word, that lords it with a smile over the unconscious and inarticulate. To this power he surrendered with all the passion of youth, and it rewarded him with all it had to give, taking from him inexorably, in return, all that it is wont to take. It sharpened his eyes and made him see through the large words which puff out the bosoms of mankind; it opened for him men’s souls and his own, made him clairvoyant, showed him the inwardness of the world and the ultimate behind men’s words and deeds. And all that he saw could be put in two words: the comedy and the tragedy of life. And then, with knowledge, its torment and its arrogance, came solitude; because he could not endure the blithe and innocent with their darkened understanding, while they in turn were troubled by the sign on his brow. But his love of the word kept growing sweeter and sweeter, and his love of form; for he used to say (and had already said it in writing) that knowledge of the soul would unfailingly make us melancholy if the pleasures of expression did not keep us alert and of good cheer.”

WritingArtistCreativitySolitudeIntellectTormentWordLogos
Book:Death in Venice and Other Stories
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“The observations and encounters of a man of solitude and few words are at once more nebulous and more intense than those of a gregarious man, his thoughts more ponderable, more bizarre and never without a hint of sadness. Images and perceptions that might easily be dismissed with a glance, a laugh, an exchange of opinions occupy him unduly; they are heightened in the silence, gain in significance, turn into experience, adventure, emotion. Solitude begets originality, bold and disconcerting beauty, poetry. But solitude can also beget perversity, disparity, the absurd and the forbidden.”

SolitudeO Rly
Book:Death in Venice
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“He loved the sea for deep-seated reasons: the hardworking artist's need for repose, the desire to take shelter from the demanding diversity of phenomena in the bosom of boundless simplicity, a propensity—proscribed and diametrically opposed to his mission in life and for that very reason seductive—a propensity for the unarticulated, the immoderate, the eternal, for nothingness. To repose in perfection is the desire of all those who strive for excellence, and is not nothingness a form of perfection?”

ArtDeathWorkSeaEternalPerfectionExcellenceSimplicityMissionShelterExistentialNothingnessReposePropensityThanatosOceanicBosomProscribed
Book:Death in Venice
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“But a man of tender sensitivities finds disruption unpleasant; he finds it unpleasant to break in on a well-constructed train of thought with his own logical or historical objections culled from memory, and even in the anti-intellectual he will honor and respect the intellect. Today we can see clearly enough that it was the mistake of our civilization to have been all too generous in exercising such forbearance and respect—since on the opposing side we were indeed dealing with naked insolence and the most determined intolerance.”

GermanyFascismIntoleranceEtiquettePolitenessBourgeoisInsolenceAnti Intellectual
Book:Doctor Faustus
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“We are the bourgeoisie—the third estate, as they call us now—and what we want is a nobility of merit, nothing more. We don't recognize this lazy nobility we now have, we reject our present class hierarchy. We want all men to be free and equal, for no one to be someone else's subject, but for all to be subject to the law. There should be an end of privileges and arbitrary power. Everyone should be treated equally as a child of the state, and just as there are no longer any middlemen between the layman and his God, so each citizen should stand in direct relation to the state. We want freedom of the press, of employment, of commerce. We want all men to compete without any special privileges, and the only crown should be the crown of merit.”

FreedomDemocracyCompetitionEqualityGermanyMiddle ClassHierarchyMonarchyAristocracyStateBourgeoisieSocial ClassProtestantism
Book:Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family
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“Nuestra muerte es más un asunto de los que nos sobreviven que de nosotros mismos. Tanto si recordamos eso o no por el momento, esas palabras de un sabio malicioso son, en todo caso, valederas para el alma: "Mientras existimos, la muerte no existe, y, cuando la muerte existe, no existimos nosotros", por consiguiente, entre la muerte y nosotros no hay ninguna relación real; es una cosa que no nos atañe absolutamente en nada, que atañe todo lo mas al mundo y la naturaleza, y por eso todos los seres la contemplan con una gran tranquilidad y una incidencia egoísta.”

Existencialismo
Book:La montaña mágica
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