How can I free myself from sexuality? Eat nothing but rice?

— Thomas Mann

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

— Thomas Mann

I bear within me the seed, the rudiments, the possibility of life's capacities and endeavors. Where might I be, if I were not here? Who, what, how could I be, if I were not me, if this outward appearance that is me did not encase me, separating my consciousness from that of others who are not me? An organism—a blind, rash, pitiful eruption of the insistent assertion of the will. Far better, really, if that will were to drift free in a night without time or space, than to languish in a prison cell lit only by the flickering, uncertain flame of the intellect.

— Thomas Mann

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

— Thomas Mann

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.

— Thomas Mann

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.

— Thomas Mann

Isn't the vastness of the past the more profound, the more legendary, the more immediately it falls before the present ?

— Thomas Mann

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.

— Thomas Mann

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.

— Thomas Mann

It is love not reason that is stronger than death.

— Thomas Mann