It was the smile of Narcissus bending over the water mirror, the deep, enchanted, protracted smile with which he stretched out his arms to the reflection of his own beauty, an ever so slightly contorted smile – contorted by the hopelessness of his endeavor to kiss the lovely lips of his shadow – and coquettish, inquisitive and mildly pained, beguiled and beguiling.

— Thomas Mann

Thomas Mann Quotes

We come out of darkness and return to darkness, with some experiences in between. But we don’t experience the beginning and the end, birth and death. We are not subjectively aware of them, they exist only in the world of objective events – and that’s that.

— Thomas Mann

Pieter Peeperkorn will now regale himself with a schnapps.

— Thomas Mann

Malice, my dear sir, is the animating spirit of criticism; and criticism is the beginning of progress and enlightenment.

— Thomas Mann

The policy are to be commended.′ Aschenbach replied, and after a brief exchange of meteorological observations the manager excused himself.

— Thomas Mann

I confess the contrariness and mischievousness of his ideas but render our acquaintance the more attractive. I need the friction. Opinions cannot survive if one has no chance to fight for them – and I am only confirmed in mine.

— Thomas Mann

But if they had no sun, they had snow. Such masses of snow as Hans Castorp had never till now in all his life beheld.

— Thomas Mann

And this whole sunny region – these easily scaled coastal heights, these laughing rock-bound pools, and the sea itself, as far as the islands where boats sailed past now and then – was populated in all directions: people, children of the sea and sun, were stirring and resting everywhere, intelligent, cheerful, beautiful, young humanity, so fair to gaze upon. And at the sight, Hans Castorp’s whole heart opened wide – painfully, lovingly wide.

— Thomas Mann

Time, we say, is Lethe; but change of air is a similar draught, and, if it works less thoroughly, does so more quickly.

— Thomas Mann

Very well can love come out of evil, and out of disorder something ordered for the best.

— Thomas Mann

That seems so strange to me: diseased and stupid both – I don’t exactly know how to express it, but it gives me a most peculiar feeling, when somebody is so stupid, and then ill into the bargain. It must be the most melancholy thing in life.

— Thomas Mann

Man himself is a mystery, and all humanity rests upon reverence before the mystery that is man.

— Thomas Mann

For he was by nature and temperament passive, could sit without occupation hours on end, and loved, as we know, to see time spacious before him, and not to have the sense of its passing banished, wiped out or eaten up by prosaic activity.

— Thomas Mann

Don’t you like the sight of a coffin? I really do. I find it a handsome piece of furniture, even empty; when someone is lying in it, then, in my eyes, it is positively sublime.

— Thomas Mann

Her friends were the hollow-chested man, the whimsical girl with the fuzzy hair, the silent Dr. Blumenkohl, and the youth with the drooping shoulders...

— Thomas Mann

The world seemed spellbound in icy purity, its earthly blemishes veiled; it lay fixed in a deathlike, enchanted trance.

— Thomas Mann

What was one day, taken for instance from the moment one sat down to the midday meal to the same moment four-and-twenty hours afterwards? It was, to be sure, four-and-twenty hours – but equally it was the simple sum of nothings.

— Thomas Mann

They let him be. He was like the scholar in the peculiarly happy state of never being “asked” any more; of never having a task, of being left to sit, since the fact of his being left behind is established, and no one troubles about him further – an orgiastic kind of freedom, but we ask ourselves whether, indeed, freedom ever is or can be of any other kind.

— Thomas Mann

I can imagine Herr Settembrini coming in suddenly and turning on the light, to let reason and convention reign – it is a weakness of his.

— Thomas Mann

Has he really insulted me? But an insult must be of intent, otherwise it can be none.

— Thomas Mann

That’s what people are like: they want talent, which is inherently peculiar, yet they absolutely don’t want the peculiarities connected to it – perhaps necessarily bound up with it – which they refuse to understand or forgive.

— Thomas Mann
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