119 quotes
All interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life.
The Magic Mountain (1924)
One always has the idea of a stupid man as perfectly healthy and ordinary, and of illness as making one refined and clever and unusual.
The Magic Mountain (1924)
Disease makes men more physical, it leaves them nothing but body.
The Magic Mountain (1924)
Only indifference is free. What is distinctive is never free, it is stamped with its own seal, conditioned and chained.
Sculpting in Time (1996)
I love and reverence the Word, the bearer of the spirit, the tool and gleaming ploughshare of progress.
The Magic Mountain (1924)
Paradox is the poisonous flower of quietism, the iridescent surface of the rotting mind, the greatest depravity of all.
The Magic Mountain (1924)
I, for one, have never in my life come across a perfectly healthy human being.
The Magic Mountain (1924)
Human reason needs only to will more strongly than fate, and she is fate.
The Magic Mountain (1924)
Hold fast the time! Guard it, watch over it, every hour, every minute!
The Beloved Returns (1939)
What a wonderful phenomenon it is, carefully considered, when the human eye, that jewel of organic structures, concentrates its moist brilliance on another human creature!
Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man (1954)
It often happens that an old family, with traditions that are entirely practical, sober and bourgeois, undergoes in its declining days a kind of artistic transfiguration.
Tristan (1902)
The intellect longs for the delights of the non-intellect, that which is alive and beautiful dans sa stupidité.
Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man (1954)
A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
But my deepest and most secret love belongs to the fair-haired and the blue-eyed.
Tonio Kröger (1903)
What we call National-Socialism is the poisonous perversion of ideas which have a long history in German intellectual life.
Hold every moment sacred. Give each clarity and meaning, each the weight of thine awareness, each its true and due fulfillment.
The Beloved Returns (1939)
What a glorious gift is imagination, and what satisfaction it affords!
Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man (1954)
The invention of printing and the Reformation are and remain the two outstanding services of central Europe to the cause of humanity.
The Magic Mountain (1924)
But he would “stay the course” — it was his favorite motto.
Death in Venice (1912)
Only he who desires is amiable and not he who is satiated.
Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man (1954)