Thomas Mann
“It is remarkable how a man cannot summarize his thoughts in
even the most general sort of way without betraying himself completely, without
putting his whole self into it, quite unawares, presenting as if in allegory
the basic themes and problems of his life.”
The Magic Mountain
“A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual,
but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his
contemporaries. He may regard the general, impersonal foundations of his
existence as definitely settled and taken for granted, and be as far from
assuming a critical attitude towards them as our good Hans Castorp really was;
yet it is quite conceivable that he may none the less be vaguely conscious of
the deficiencies of his epoch and find them prejudicial to his own moral well-being.
All sorts of personal aims, hopes, ends, prospects, hover before the eyes of
the individual, and out of these he derives the impulse to ambition and
achievement. Now, if the life about him, if his own time seems, however
outwardly stimulating, to be at bottom empty of such food for his aspirations;
if he privately recognises it to be hopeless, viewless, helpless, opposing only
a hollow silence to all the questions man puts, consciously or unconsciously,
yet somehow puts, as to the final, absolute, and abstract meaning in all his
efforts and activities; then, in such a case, a certain laming of the
personality is bound to occur, the more inevitably the more upright the
character in question; a sort of palsy, as it were, which may extend from his
spiritual and moral over into his physical and organic part. In an age that
affords no satisfying answer to the eternal question of 'Why?' 'To what end?' a
man who is capable of achievement over and above the expected modicum must be
equipped either with a moral remoteness and single-mindedness which is rare
indeed and of heroic mould, or else with an exceptionally robust vitality. Hans
Castorp had neither one nor the other of these; and thus he must be considered
mediocre, though in an entirely honourable sense.”
The Magic Mountain
“He undressed, lay down, put out the light. Two names he
whispered into his pillow, the few chaste northern syllables that meant for him
his true and native way of love, of longing and happiness; that meant to him
life and home, meant simple and heartfelt feeling. He looked back on the years
that had passed. He thought of the dreamy adventures of the senses, nerves, and
mind in which he had been involved; saw himself eaten up with intellect and
introspection, ravaged and paralysed by insight, half worn out by the fevers
and frosts of creation, helpless and in anguish of conscience between two
extremes, flung to and from between austerity and lust; raffiné, impoverished,
exhausted by frigid and artificially heightened ecstasies; erring, forsaken,
martyred, and ill -- and sobbed with nostalgia and remorse.”
Tonio Kröger
“The observations and encounters of a solitary, taciturn man
are vaguer and at the same times more intense than those of a sociable man; his
thoughts are deeper, odder and never without a touch of sadness. Images and
perceptions that could be dismissed with a glance, a laugh, an exchange of
opinions, occupy him unduly, become more intense in the silence, become
significant, become an experience, an adventure, an emotion. Solitude produces
originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces
perverseness, the disproportionate, the absurd and the forbidden.”
Death in Venice
“What an absurd torture for the artist to know that an
audience identifies him with a work that, within himself, he has moved beyond
and that was merely a game played with something in which he does not believe.”
Doctor Faustus
To allow only the kind of art that the average man
understands is the worst small-mindedness and the murder of mind and spirit. It
is my conviction that the intellect can be certain that in doing what most
disconcerts the crowd, in pursuing the most daring, unconventional advances and
explorations, it will in some highly indirect fashion serve man - and in the
long run, all men.”
Doctor Faustus
...
God was present, and Abraham walked before Him, consecrated in his soul by that outward nearness of His. They were two, an I and a Thou, both of whom said " I " and to the other " Thou. " It is true that Abraham composed the properties of God, with the help of his own greatness of soul - without which He would not have known how to compose them or name them, so that they would have remained in darkness. But after all God remained a powerful Thou, saying " I , " independent of Abraham and independent of the world.