Thomas Mann citáty

page 4

„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.“

“How strange a vehicle it is, coming down unchanged from times of old romance, and so characteristically black, the way no other thing is black except a coffin — a vehicle evoking lawless adventures in the plashing stillness of night, and still more strongly evoking death itself, the bier, the dark obsequies, the last silent journey!”

“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.”

“Speech is civilization itself. The word, even the most contradictory word, preserves contact — it is silence which isolates.”

“The beautiful word begets the beautiful deed.”

“A man’s dying is more the survivors’ affair than his own.”

“He remembered the dissolute adventures in which his senses, his nervous system and his mind had indulged; he saw himself corroded by irony and intellect, laid waste and paralyzed by insight, almost exhausted by the fevers and chills of creation, helplessly and contritely tossed to and fro between gross extremes, between saintly austerity and lust — oversophisticated and impoverished, worn out by cold, rare artificial ecstasies, lost, ravaged, racked and sick — and he sobbed with remorse and nostalgia.”

“Here and there, among a thousand other peddlers, are slyly hissing dealers who urge you to come along with them to allegedly "very beautiful" girls, and not only to girls. They keep at it, walk alongside, praising their wares until you answer roughly. They don't know that you have resolved to eat nothing but rice just to escape from sexuality!”

“That daily the night falls; that over stresses and torments, cares and sorrows the blessing of sleep unfolds, stilling and quenching them; that every anew this draught of refreshment and lethe is offered to our parching lips, ever after the battle this mildness laves our shaking limbs, that from it, purified from sweat and dust and blood, strengthened, renewed, rejuvenated, almost innocent once more, almost with pristine courage and zeal we may go forth again — these I hold to be the benignest, the most moving of all the great facts of life.”

“Only he who desires is amiable and not he who is satiated.”

“What we call National-Socialism is the poisonous perversion of ideas which have a long history in German intellectual life.”

“Never had he felt the joy of the word more sweetly, never had he known so clearly that Eros dwells in language.”

“The writer’s joy is the thought that can become emotion, the emotion that can wholly become a thought.”

“Asia surrounds us — wherever one’s glance rests, a Tartar physiognomy.”

“As a science of the unconscious it is a therapeutic method, in the grand style, a method overarching the individual case. Call this, if you choose, a poet’s utopia.”

“In certain respects, particularly economically, National-Socialism is nothing but bolshevism. These two are hostile brothers of whom the younger has learned everything from the older, the Russian excepting only morality.”

“O scenes of the beautiful world! Never have you presented yourself to more appreciative eyes.”

“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!”

“Only indifference is free. What is distinctive is never free, it is stamped with its own seal, conditioned and chained.”

“This was Venice, the flattering and suspect beauty — this city, half fairy tale and half tourist trap, in whose insalubrious air the arts once rankly and voluptuously blossomed, where composers have been inspired to lulling tones of somniferous eroticism.”

“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.”

“Disease makes men more physical, it leaves them nothing but body.”

“How else is the famous short story ‘A study in Abjection’ to be understood but as an outbreak of disgust against an age indecently undermined by psychology.”

“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.”

“Beer, tobacco, and music,” he went on. “Behold the Fatherland.”

“Love as a force contributory to disease.”

“They sang their mysterious duo, sang of their nameless hope, their death-in-love, their union unending, lost forever in the embrace of night’s magic kingdom. O sweet night, everlasting night of love! Land of blessedness whose frontiers are infinite!”

“Six months at most after they get here, these young people — and they are mostly young who come — have lost every idea they had, except flirtation and temperature.”

“Paradox is the poisonous flower of quietism, the iridescent surface of the rotting mind, the greatest depravity of all.”

“Human reason needs only to will more strongly than fate, and she is fate.”