Thomas Mann

Brother of writer Heinrich Mann , Julia Elizabeth Mann (1877-1927), Carla Augusta Mann (1881-1910), Carl Viktor Mann (1890-1949).

Father of Erika Mann (writer), Golo Mann and Klaus Mann (writer), Monika Mann (1910-1992) and Michael Thomas Mann (1919-1977).

Since 1922 he defended democratic freedom and fought against the upcoming national socialism in Germany.

Received the Nobel prize for literature in 1929.

Father of Elisabeth Mann-Borgese.

Biography/bibliography in: "Contemporary Authors". New Revision Series, Vol. 133, pp. 317-333. Farmington Hills, MI: Thomson Gale, 2005.

Father-in-law of W.H. Auden

Is portrayed by Armin Mueller-Stahl on "Die Manns - Ein Jahrhundertroman" .

Father-in-law of actor Gustaf Grndgens from 1926 to 1929.

His maternal grandmother was Portuguese: Maria Senhorinha da Silva (1829-1856).

Grandfather of Fridolin Mann, born 1940, and Anthony Mann, born 1942 (Michaels sons), Angelica, born 1940, and Domenica, born 1944 (Elizabeths daughters).

Son of Thomas Johann Heinrich Mann (1840-1891) and Jlia da Silva Bruhns (1851-1923).

From 1936 to 1944 Mann and his family were citizens of Czechoslovakia.

Conferred an honorary doctors degree by the University of Bonn in 1919 (deprived in 1937, and restored in 1946).

His books were among those burned by the Nazi regime.

Lived in Dallas, Texas, from the age of 2.

Started playing ice hockey when he was age 5 and played for his high school.

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.

It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.

Nothing is more curious and awkward than the relationship of two people who only know each other with their eyes — who meet and observe each other daily, even hourly and who keep up the impression of disinterest either because of morals or because of a mental abnormality. Between them there is listlessness and pent-up curiosity, the hysteria of an unsatisfied, unnaturally suppressed need for communion and also a kind of tense respect. Because man loves and honors man as long as he is not able to judge him, and desire is a product of lacking knowledge.

Forbearance in the face of fate, beauty constant under torture, are not merely passive. They are a positive achievement, an explicit triumph.

Laughter is a sunbeam of the soul.

He took in the squeaky music, the vulgar and pining melodies, because passion immobilizes good taste and seriously considers what soberly would be thought of as funny and to be resented.

A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

Nothing is stranger or more ticklish than a relationship between people who know each other only by sight, who meet and observe each other daily - no hourly - and are nevertheless compelled to keep up the pose of an indifferent stranger, neither greeting nor addressing each other, whether out of etiquette or their own whim.

And life? Life itself? Was it perhaps only an infection, a sickening of matter? Was that which one might call the original procreation of matter only a disease, a growth produced by morbid stimulation of the immaterial? The first step toward evil, toward desire and death, was taken precisely then, when there took place that first increase in the density of the spiritual, that pathologically luxuriant morbid growth, produced by the irritant of some unknown infiltration; this, in part pleasurable, in part a motion of self-defense, was the primeval stage of matter, the transition from the insubstantial to the substance. This was the Fall.

Nature in her creative dreaming, dreamt the same thing both here and there, and if one spoke of imitation, then certainly it had to be reciprocal. Should one take the children of the soil as models because they possessed the depth of organic reality, whereas the ice flowers were mere external phenomena? But as phenomena, they were the result of an interplay of matter no less complex than that found in plants. If I understood our friendly host correctly, what concerned him was the unity of animate and so-called inanimate nature, the idea that we sin against the latter if the boundary we draw between the two spheres is too rigid, when in reality it is porous, since there is no elementary capability that is reserved exclusively for living creatures or that the biologist could not likewise study on inanimate models.

War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.

Naphta loathed the bourgeois state and its love of security. He found occasion to express this loathing one autumn afternoon when, as they were walking along the main street, it suddenly began to rain and, as if on command, there was an umbrella over every head. That was a symbol of cowardice and vulgar effeminacy, the end product of civilization. An incident like the sinking of the Titanic was atavistic, true, but its effect was most refreshing, it was the handwriting on the wall. Afterward, of course, came the hue and cry for more security in shipping. How pitiful, but such weak-willed humanitarianism squared very nicely with the wolfish cruelty and villainy of slaughter on the economic battlefield known as the bourgeois state. War, war ! He was all for it – the universal lust for war seemed quite honorable in comparison.

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.

Is not the pastness of the past the more profound, the more legendary, the more immediately it falls before the present ?,Deep is the well of the past. Should we not call it bottomless?,He completely lacked any ardent interest that might have occupied his mind. His interior life was impoverished, had undergone a deterioration so severe that it was like the almost constant burden of some vague grief. And bound up with it all was an implacable sense of personal duty and the grim determination to present himself at his best, to conceal his frailties by any means possible, and to keep up appearances. It had all contributed to making his existence what it was: artificial, self-conscious, and forced—until every word, every gesture, the slightest deed in the presence of others had become a taxing and grueling part in a play.

Space, like time, engenders forgetfulness; but it does so by setting us bodily free from our surroundings and giving us back our primitive, unattached state . . . Time, we say, is Lethe; but change of air is a similar draught, and, if it works less thoroughly, does so more quickly.

To be young means to be original, to have remained nearer to the sources of life: it means to be able to stand up and shake off the fetters of an outlived civilization, to dare -- where others lack the courage-- to plunge again into the elemental.

For passion, like crime does not sit well with the sure order and even course of everyday life. It welcomes every loosening of the social fabric, every confusion and affliction visited upon the world, for passion sees in such a disorder a vague hope of finding advantage for itself.

Or was he merely a mollycoddled favorite, enjoying capriciously prejudiced love? Schenback was inclined to believe the latter. Inborn in nearly every artist’s nature is a voluptuous, treacherous tendency to accept the injustice if it creates beauty and to grant sympathy and homage to aristocratic preferences.

This old, folkish layer survives in us all, and to speak as I really think, I do not consider religion the most adequate means of keeping it under lock and key. For that, literature alone avails, humanistic science, the ideal of the free and beautiful human being.

Innate in nearly every artistic nature is a wanton, treacherous penchant for accepting injustice when it creates beauty and showing sympathy for and paying homage to aristocratic privilege.

Prayers and love are learned in the hour when prayer has become impossible and your heart has turned to stone.

Passionate—that means to live for the sake of living. But one knows that you all live for sake of experience. Passion, that is self-forgetfulness. But what you all want is self-enrichment.

Travelers prove their lack of education if they make fun of the customs and values of their hosts, and the qualities that do a person honour are many and varied.

A lonely, quiet person has observations and experiences that are at once both more indistinct and more penetrating than those of one more gregarious; his thoughts are weightier, stranger, and never without a tinge of sadness. Loneliness fosters that which is original, daringly and bewilderingly beautiful, poetic. But loneliness also fosters that which is perverse, incongruous, absurd, forbidden.

At thirty a man steps out of the darkness and wasteland of preparation into active life it is the time to show oneself, the time of fulfillment.

Disease was a perverse, a dissolute form of life. And life? Life itself? Was it perhaps only an infection, a sickening of matter? Was that which one might call the original procreation of matter only a disease, a growth produced by morbid stimulation of the immaterial? The first step toward evil, toward desire and death, was taken precisely then, when there took place that first increase in the density of the spiritual, that pathologically luxuriant morbid growth, produced by the irritant of some unknown infiltration; this, in part pleasurable, in part a motion of self-defence, was the primeval stage of matter, the transition from the insubstantial to the substance. This was the Fall. The second creation, the birth of the organic out of the inorganic, was only another fatal stage in the progress of the corporeal toward consciousness, just as disease in the organism was an intoxication, a heightening and unlicensed accentuation of its physical state; and life, life was nothing but the next step on the reckless path of the spirit dishonored; nothing but the automatic blush of matter roused to sensation and become receptive for that which awaked it.

Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.

Consciousness of self was an inherent function of matter once it was organized as life, and if that function was enhanced it turned against the organism that bore it, strove to fathom and explain the very phenomenon that produced it, a hope-filled and hopeless striving of life to comprehend itself, as if nature were rummaging to find itself in itself - ultimately to no avail, since nature cannot be reduced to comprehension, nor in the end can life listen to itself.

A harmful truth is better than a useful lie.

I know I am talking nonsense, but I’d rather go rambling on, and partly expressing something I find it difficult to express, than to keep on transmitting faultless platitudes.

Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportianate, the absurd and the forbidden.

A solitary, unused to speaking of what he sees and feels, has mental experiences which are at once more intense and less articulate than those of a gregarious man. They are sluggish, yet more wayward, and never without a melancholy tinge. Sights and impressions which others brush aside with a glance, a light comment, a smile, occupy him more than their due; they sink silently in, they take on meaning, they become experience, emotion, adventure. 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.

The observations and encounters of a man of solitude and few words are at once more nebulous and more intense than those of a gregarious man, his thoughts more ponderable, more bizarre and never without a hint of sadness. Images and perceptions that might easily be dismissed with a glance, a laugh, an exchange of opinions occupy him unduly; they are heightened in the silence, gain in significance, turn into experience, adventure, emotion. Solitude begets originality, bold and disconcerting beauty, poetry. But solitude can also beget perversity, disparity, the absurd and the forbidden.

Discussions should always be held just before going to bed, your rear protected by sleep. How painful, after an intellectual conversation, to have to go about with your mind so stirred up.

The sweet spot is where duty and delight converge.

Order and simplification are the first steps towards mastery of a subject,How can I free myself from sexuality? Eat nothing but rice?,Opinions cannot survive if one has no chance to fight for them.

Kindly permit me to tell you, sir, that I hate you. I hate you and your child, as I hate the life of which you are the representative: cheap, ridiculous, but yet triumphant life, the everlasting antipodes and deadly enemy of beauty. I cannot say I despise you - for I am honest. You are stronger than I. I have no armour for the struggle between us, I have only the Word, avenging weapon of the weak. Today I have availed myself of this weapon. This letter is nothing but an act of revenge - you see how honourable I am - and if any word of mine is sharp and bright and beautiful enough to strike home, to make you feel the presence of a power you do not know, to shake even a minute your robust equilibrium, I shall rejoice indeed. -,For the sake of goodness and love, man shall grant death no dominion over his thoughts.

Perfectionism, of course, was something which even as a young man he had come to see as the innermost essence of talent.

There are so many different kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst.

The accouterments of life were so rich and varied, so elaborated, that almost no place at all was left for life itself. Each and every accessory was so costly and beautiful that it had an existence above and beyond the purpose it was meant to serve – confusing the observer and absorbing attention.

They walked, and the long waves rolled and murmured rhythmically beside them; the fresh salty wind blew free and unobstructed in their faces, wrapped itself around their ears, and made them feel slightly numb and deliciously dizzy. They walked along in that wide, peaceful, whispering hush of the sea that gives every sound, near or far, some mysterious importance.

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

I tell them that if they will occupy themselves with the study of mathematics they will find in it the best remedy against the lusts of the flesh.

The perishableness of life. . . imparts value, dignity, interest to life.

One could say that someone who does nothing but wait is like a glutton whose digestive system processes great masses of food without extracting any useful nourishment. One could go further and say that just as undigested food does not strengthen a man, time spent in waiting does not age him.

But the boredom of Frau Spatz had by now reached that pitch where it distorts the countenance of man, makes the eyes protrude from the head, and lends the features a corpselike and terrifying aspect. More than that, this music acted on the nerves that controlled her digestion, producing in her dyspeptic organism such malaise that she was really afraid she would have an attack.

But even those five-and-forty minutes were too long, the bored me --and boredom is the coldest thing in the world.

Speech is civilization itself.

Time cools time clarifies no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours.

Habituation is a falling asleep or fatiguing of the sense of time which explains why young years pass slowly while later life flings itself faster and faster upon its course.

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

It is love not reason that is stronger than death.

He who loves the more is the inferior and must suffer.

A human being who is first of all an invalid is all body therein lies his inhumanity and his debasement.

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

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.

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

What the collective age wants allows and approves is the perpetual holiday from the self.

No man remains quite what he was when he recognizes himself.

Time cools time clarifies no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours.

Speech is civilization itself. The word even the most contradictory word preserves contact - it is silence which isolates.

It is a strange fact that freedom and equality, the two basic ideas of democracy, are to some extent contradictory. Logically considered, freedom and equality are mutually exclusive, just as society and the individual are mutually exclusive.

For to be poised against fatality, to meet adverse conditions gracefully, is more than simple endurance; it is an act of aggression, a positive triumph.

For 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.

Everything is politics. .