119 quotes
I stand between two worlds, am at home in neither, and in consequence have rather a hard time of it.
Tonio Kröger (1902)
The writer's joy is the thought that can become emotion, the emotion that can wholly become a thought.
Death in Venice (1912)
Time cools, time clarifies, no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours.
The Magic Mountain (1924)
Order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject — the actual enemy is the unknown.
The Magic Mountain (1924)
If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it.
Tonio Kröger (1902)
A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
Love stands opposed to death. It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.
The Magic Mountain (1924)
Time, we say, is Lethe; but change of air is a similar draught, and, if it works less thoroughly, does so more quickly.
The Magic Mountain (1924)
Analysis can be a very unappetizing affair, as much so as death.
The Magic Mountain (1924)
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.
Death in Venice (1912)
Opinions cannot survive if one has no chance to fight for them.
The Magic Mountain (1924)
A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.
The Magic Mountain (1924)
It is a cruel atmosphere down there, cruel and ruthless.
The Magic Mountain (1924)
Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.
The Magic Mountain (1924)
Unhappy German nation, how do you like the Messianic role allotted to you, not by God, nor by destiny, but by a handful of perverted and bloody-minded men?
This War (1939)
"Love as a force contributory to disease."
The Magic Mountain (1924)
It is not good when people no longer believe in war. Pretty soon they no longer believe in many other things which they absolutely must believe in if they are to be decent men.
Survey of Contemporary Literature (1977)
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.
The Magic Mountain (1924)
I have an epic, not a dramatic nature. My disposition and my desires call for peace to spin my thread, for a steady rhythm in life and art.
Fanaticism turns into a means of salvation, enthusiasm into epileptic ecstasy, politics becomes an opiate for the masses, a proletarian eschatology; and reason veils her face.