Thomas Mann citáty

page 5

„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.“

“This longing for the bliss of the commonplace.”

“It is a cruel atmosphere down there, cruel and ruthless.”

“I never can understand how anyone can not smoke — it deprives a man of the best part of life … with a good cigar in his mouth a man is perfectly safe, nothing can touch him — literally.”

“Democracy is timelessly human, and timelessness always implies a certain amount of potential youthfulness.”

“Wagner’s art is the most sensational self-portrayal and self-critique of German nature that it is possible to conceive.”

“This conflict between the powers of love and chastity … it ended apparently in the triumph of chastity. Love was suppressed, held in darkness and chains, by fear, conventionality, aversion, or a tremulous yearning to be pure…. But this triumph of chastity was only an apparent, a pyrrhic victory. It would break through the ban of chastity, it would emerge — if in a form so altered as to be unrecognizable.”

“I, for one, have never in my life come across a perfectly healthy human being.”

“Opinions cannot survive if one has no chance to fight for them.”

“If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it.”

“I met the New Passion, then, as democracy, as political enlightenment and the humanitarianism of happiness. I understood its efforts to be toward the politicization of everything ethos; its aggressiveness and doctrinary intolerance consisted – I experienced them personally – in its denial and slander of every nonpolitical ethos. “Mankind” as humanitarian internationalism; “reason” and “virtue” as the radical republic; intellect as a thing between a Jacobin club and Freemasonry; art as social literature and maliciously seductive rhetoric in the service of social “desirability”; here we have the New Passion in its purest political form as I saw it close up. I admit that this is a special, extremely romanticized form of it.”

“He was all for catharsis and purification, he dreamed of an aesthetic consecration that should cleanse society of luxury, the greed of gold and all unloveliness.”

“What they, in their innocence, cannot comprehend is that a properly constituted, healthy, decent man never writes, acts, or composes.”

“What a glorious gift is imagination, and what satisfaction it affords!”

“Two principles, according to the Settembrinian cosmogony, were in perpetual conflict for possession of the world: force and justice, tyranny and freedom, superstition and knowledge; the law of permanence and the law of change, of ceaseless fermentation issuing in progress.”

“The intellect longs for the delights of the non-intellect, that which is alive and beautiful dans sa stupidité.”

“Hidden away amongst Aschenbach’s writing was a passage directly asserting that nearly all the great things that exist owe their existence to a defiant despite: it is despite grief and anguish, despite poverty, loneliness, bodily weakness, vice and passion and a thousand inhibitions, that they have come into being at all. But this was more than an observation, it was an experience, it was positively the formula of his life and his fame, the key to his work.”

“I must tell you that we artists cannot tread the path of Beauty without Eros keeping company with us and appointing himself as our guide.”

“There is both rhyme and reason in what I say, I have made a dream poem of humanity. I will cling to it. I will be good. I will let death have no mastery over my thoughts. For therein lies goodness and love of humankind, and in nothing else.”

“With astonishment Aschenbach noticed that the boy was entirely beautiful. His countenance, pale and gracefully reserved, was surrounded by ringlets of honey-colored hair, and with its straight nose, its enchanting mouth, its expression of sweet and divine gravity, it recalled Greek sculpture of the noblest period.”

“Latin phrase meaning "It pleases to experiment", Ch. 4”
Placet experiri

“I have read your book and its terrible documentation with deepest emotion. I cannot describe the mixed feeling of abhorrence and loathing which has filled my heart while perusing these records of human degradation and abominable cruelty.. . . To keep quiet would serve only the moral indifference of the world. . . You have done your duty in publishing this book and bringing these facts to light.”

“One always has the idea of a stupid man as perfectly healthy and ordinary, and of illness as making one refined and clever and unusual.”

“My aversion from music rests on political grounds.”

“Psycho-analyses — how disgusting.”

“Extraordinary creature! So close a friend, and yet so remote.”

“Reduced to a miserable mass level, the level of a Hitler, German Romanticism broke out into hysterical barbarism.”

“It is not good when people no longer believe in war. Pretty soon they no longer believe in many other things which they absolutely must believe in if they are to be decent men.”

“But he would “stay the course” — it was his favorite motto.”

“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 preciser name; they simply cannot pass each other, their mutual embarrassment is frightful to behold.”