Thomas Mann

Time has no divisions 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 off pistols.

Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away—an ephemeral apparition. When we think of the unending growth and decay of life and civilizations, we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity. Yet I have never lost a sense of something that lives and endures underneath the eternal flux. What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains.

Illness in the body is often the vanguard of some exceptional kind of health at its fullest bloom.

Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.

Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.

Every solution to a problem creates a new problem.

Each human being has his own posology; so it is said. The doses of love necessary to poison someone and make him die can be extraordinarily varied; they range from the infinitesimally small to what is virtually the fatal, lethal dose.

Life in established society is but a mask for life in its essence. The reverent fear entailed by the mask enables them to live in harmony—so to speak—with one another. But the great secret of the mask is that it is life, and they exist in it limited. It is the spirit of the mask.

Without further ado, Joachim Zeppenfeld shared his doubts about all we call progress.

In old days, it must be remembered, there were angels who took the forms of men. The vice-regent of the Creator met with no less capable demons, and these minions did their wicked will as to be able to corrupt the innocent too.

Whether comforting or killing, God may well have limited his direct workings to the realm of morals, and may rather have left physics up to chance.

The natural human condition is a veiled dance of tragedy and comedy, of grandiose aims and mediocre successes, of well-bred longings and mortal inadequacies.