Thursday, April 24, 2008

Thomas Mann

Ancient Agora - Athens, Greece - 2007



1. ”A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a great truth.”
2. ”A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”
3. “Disease makes men more physical; it leaves them with nothing but body.”
4. "For the myth is the foundation of life."
5. "If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it."
6. “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.”
7. "It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death."
8. “Opinions cannot survive if one has no chance to fight for them.”
9. "Order and simplification are the first steps towards the mastery of a subject."
10. "Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous- to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd."
11. "Speech is civilization itself. The word... preserves contact -- it is silence which isolates."
12. "The only religious way to think of death is as part and parcel of life."
13. “This was love at first sight, love everlasting: a feeling unknown, unhoped for, unexpected--in so far as it could be a matter of conscious awareness; it took entire possession of him, and he understood, with joyous amazement, that this was for life.”
14. “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.”
15. "This was love at first sight, love everlasting: a feeling unknown, unhoped for, unexpected--in so far as it could be a matter of conscious awareness; it took entire possession of him, and he understood, with joyous amazement, that this was for life."
16. ”War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.”
17. "We don't love qualities, we love persons; sometimes by reason of their defects as well as of their qualities."
18. "What happens to a man is less significant than what happens within him."
19. "You ask what is the use of classification, arrangement, systemization? I answer you: order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject-the actual enemy is the unknown."