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Date of Birth
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06-June-1875
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Place of Birth
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Lübeck
(Germany, Schleswig-Holstein)
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Nationality
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Czechoslovakia, United States of America, German Empire
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Also know as
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Paul Thomas Mann, Mann, Пауль Ð¢Ð¾Ð¼Ð°Ñ ÐœÐ°Ð½Ð½, Dr Thomas Mann, Paul Thomas Mann
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Profession
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Essayist, Writer, Novelist, Author, Philanthropist
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Quotes
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- Opinions cannot survive if one has no chance to fight for them.
- The meeting in the open of two dogs, strangers to each other, is one of the most painful, thrilling, and pregnant of all conceivable encounters; it is surrounded by an atmosphere of the last canniness, presided over by a constraint for which I have no precise name; they simply cannot pass each other, their mutual embarrassment is frightful to behold.
- Every reasonable human being should be a moderate Socialist.
- We, when we sow the seeds of doubt deeper than the most up-to-date and modish free-thought has ever dreamed of doing, we well know what we are about. Only out of radical skeptics, out of moral chaos, can the Absolute spring, the anointed Terror of which the time has need.
- Human reason needs only to will more strongly than fate, and she is fate.
- What is uttered is finished and done with.
- Extraordinary creature! So close a friend, and yet so remote.
- I have always been an admirer. I regard the gift of admiration as indispensable if one is to amount to something; I don't know where I would be without it.
- Order and simplification are the first steps towards the mastery of a subject.
- 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.
- Speech is civilization itself. The word... preserves contact -- it is silence which isolates.
- 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.
- 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.
- You ask what is the use of classification, arrangement, systemization? I answer you: order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject-the actual enemy is the unknown.
- If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it.
- 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.
- The only religious way to think of death is as part and parcel of life.
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Thomas Mann was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist and 1929 Nobel laureate. His highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and novellas, are noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual. His analysis and critique of the European and German soul used modernized German and Biblical stories, as well as the ideas of Goethe, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. Mann was a member of the Hanseatic Mann family and portrayed his family and class in the novel Buddenbrooks. His older brother was the radical writer Heinrich Mann and three of his six children, Erika Mann, Klaus Mann and Golo Mann, also became important German writers. When Hitler came to power in 1933, Mann fled to Switzerland. When World War II broke out in 1939, he emigrated to the United States, whence he returned to Switzerland in 1952. Thomas Mann is one of the best-known exponents of the so-called Exilliteratur.
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