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Admiration
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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.
-Thomas Mann
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Authors & Writing
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The electrifying influence exercised on a whole generation just after the First World War by Demian...is unforgettable. With uncanny accuracy this poetic work struck the nerve of the times and called forth grateful rapture from a whole youthful generation who believed that an interpreter of their innermost life had risen from their own midst.
-Thomas Mann, From the Introduction to Herman Hesse's Demian, 1919
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Communism
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Every reasonable human being should be a moderate Socialist.
-Thomas Mann
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Conversation
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Speech is civilization itself. The word... preserves contact -- it is silence which isolates.
-Thomas Mann
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Death
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The only religious way to think of death is as part and parcel of life.
-Thomas Mann
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Democracy
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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.
-Thomas Mann
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Dogs
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Extraordinary creature! So close a friend, and yet so remote.
-Thomas Mann
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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.
-Thomas Mann
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Doubt
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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.
-Thomas Mann
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Fate & Destiny
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Human reason needs only to will more strongly than fate, and she is fate.
-Thomas Mann
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Ideas
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If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it.
-Thomas Mann
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Language
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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.
-Thomas Mann
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Love
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This was love at first sight, love everlasting: a feeling unknown, unhoped for, unexpected - in so far as it could be a matter of conscious awareness; it took entire possession of him, and he understood, with joyous amazement, that this was for life.
-Thomas Mann
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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 far in saying at once that she is politically suspect.
-Thomas Mann
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Mystery
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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.
-Thomas Mann
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Opinion
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Opinions cannot survive if one has no chance to fight for them.
-Thomas Mann
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Simplicity
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Order and simplification are the first steps towards the mastery of a subject.
-Thomas Mann
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Solitude
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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.
-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.
-Thomas Mann, Death in Venice, 1911
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Speeches (oratory)
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What is uttered is finished and done with.
-Thomas Mann
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Time
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Time has no division to mark its passage, there is never a thunderstorm 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 pistols.
-Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
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Hold fast the time! Guard it, watch over it, every hour, every minute! Unregarded it slips away, like a lizard, smooth, slippery, faithless, a pixy wife. Hold every moment sacred. Give each clarity and meaning, each the weight of thine awareness, each its true and due fulfillment.
-Thomas Mann, The Beloved Returns, 1939
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Tolerance
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Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.
-Thomas Mann
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Books by and about Thomas Mann