"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, huma..."
- Thomas Mann
"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."
"His games have a deeper meaning and fascination that adults can no longer fathom and require nothing more than three pebbles, or a piece of wood with a dandelion helmet, perhaps; but above all they re..."
"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 wi..."
"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 ..."
"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 ..."