Thomas Mann citáty

page 2

„Spisovateľ je človek, pre ktorého je písanie zložitejšie ako pre iných ľudí.“

„Samota v nás vyvoláva originalitu, krásu neznámu a nebezpečnú - poéziu. Ale tiež v nás môže vyvolať ten pravý opak - zvrátenosť, nezákonnosť, absurdnosť.“

„Život nie je prostriedkom na dosiahnutie estetického ideálu dokonalosti, naopak, práca je etickým symbolom života.“

„Každý okamih je posvätný. Dajte každému okamihu jasnosť a zmysel, každému váhu svojho vedomia, každému jeho pravé a náležité naplnenie.“

„Každý rozumný človek by mal byť umierneným socialistom.“

„Je to láska, nie rozum, ktorá je silnejšia ako smrť.“

„Kto vie, aká cenná je láska? Iba ten, kto ľúbi, no koho neľúbia.“

„Pre hlúpe ženy máme galantnosť, ale čo si počať s múdrymi?“

„Pre hlúpe ženy sú na svete šperky, čo však môžeme ponúknuť tým šikovným?“

„Vojna je iba zbabelý útek od problémov v mieri.“

„Kto nepozná minulosť, nepochopí budúcnosť.“

„Človek má iba jeden život a žiaľ, často ani ten nepatrí jemu.“

„Ktorý mladý muž, ktorému sa oddá milenka, to nepovažuje za totožné s povýšením na pána sveta?“

„Myšlienky nemožno prežiť, ak človek zaň nemôže bojovať.“

„Zbožnosť je druhom múdrosti, je to Božia múdrosť.“

„Kto ti hovorí o chybách druhých bude aj druhým rozprávať aj o tvojich chybách.“

„Ľudia, ktorí príliš žijú, netvoria.“

„Omyl je o to nebezpečnejší, o čo viac pravdy obsahuje.“

„Pochvala je hrozne odporná strava. Chutná síce dobre, ale človek sa jej veľmi rýchlo preje.“

„Pravda, ktorá bolí, je mnohokrát lepšia ako lož.“

„Dobre písať bolo takmer to isté ako dobre myslieť a dobre myslieť bolo skoro to isté ako dobre konať.“

“It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.”

“Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.”

“Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportianate, the absurd and the forbidden.”

“No man remains quite what he was when he recognizes himself.”

“War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.”

“There are so many different kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst.”

“There is only one real misfortune: to forfeit one's own good opinion of oneself. Lose your complacency, once betray your own self-contempt and the world will unhesitatingly endorse it.”

“I know I am talking nonsense, but I’d rather go rambling on, and partly expressing something I find it difficult to express, than to keep on transmitting faultless platitudes.”

“He probably was mediocre after all, though in a very honorable sense of that word.”

“A harmful truth is better than a useful lie.”

“Yes, they are carnal, both of them, love and death, and therein lies their terror and their great magic!”

“I stand between two worlds, am at home in neither, and in consequence have rather a hard time of it.”

“Distance in a straight line has no mystery. The mystery is in the sphere.”

“All interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life.”

“He thought what a fine thing it was that people made music all over the world, even in the strangest settings – probably even on polar expeditions.”

“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.”

“Thought that can merge wholly into feeling, feeling that can merge wholly into thought - these are the artist's highest joy.”

“Technology and comfort - having those, people speak of culture, but do not have it.”

“Only love, and not reason, yields kind thoughts.”

“What good would politics be, if it didn’t give everyone the opportunity to make moral compromises.”

“We do not fear being called meticulous, inclining as we do to the view that only the exhaustive can be truly interesting.”

“Order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject — the actual enemy is the unknown.”

“The days began to fly now, and yet each one of them was stretched by renewed expectations and swollen with silent, private experiences. Yes, time is a puzzling thing, there is something about it that is hard to explain.”

“It seemed that at the end of the lecture Dr. Krokowski was making propaganda for psycho-analysis; with open arms he summoned all and sundry to come unto him. "Come unto me," he was saying, though not in those words, " come unto me, all ye who are weary and heavy-laden." And he left no doubt of his conviction that all those present were weary and heavy-laden. He spoke of secret suffering, of shame and sorrow, of the redeeming power of the analytic. He advocated the bringing of light into the unconscious mind and explained how the abnormality was metamorphosed into the conscious emotion; he urged them to have confidence; he promised relief.”

“The ancients adorned their sarcophagi with the emblems of life and procreation, and even with obscene symbols; in the religions of antiquity the sacred and the obscene often lay very close together. These men knew how to pay homage to death. For death is worthy of homage as the cradle of life, as the womb of palingenesis.”

“I love and reverence the Word, the bearer of the spirit, the tool and gleaming ploughshare of progress.”

“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.”

“The new hero-type favored by Aschenbach, and recurring in his books in a multiplicity of individual variants, had already been remarked upon at an early stage by a shrewd commentator, who had described his conception as that of “an intellectual and boyish manly virtue, that of a youth who clenches his teeth in proud shame and stands calmly on as the swords and spears pass through his body … the figure of Saint Sebastian is the most perfect symbol if not of art in general, then certainly of the kind of art in question.”

“There were profound reasons for his attachment to the sea: he loved it because as a hard-working artist he needed rest, needed to escape from the demanding complexity of phenomena and lie hidden on the bosom of the simple and tremendous; because of a forbidden longing deep within him that ran quite contrary to his life’s task and was for that very reason seductive, a longing for the unarticulated and immeasurable, for eternity, for nothingness. To rest in the arms of perfection is the desire of any man intent upon creating excellence; and is not nothingness a form of perfection?”