48 quotes
My aversion from music rests on political grounds.
The Magic Mountain (1924)
The beautiful word begets the beautiful deed.
The Magic Mountain (1924)
Writing well was almost the same as thinking well, and thinking well was the next thing to acting well.
The Magic Mountain (1924)
Six months at most after they get here, these young people — and they are mostly young who come — have lost every idea they had, except flirtation and temperature.
The Magic Mountain (1924)
The only religious way to think of death is as part and parcel of life; to regard it, with the understanding and the emotions, as the inviolable condition of life.
The Magic Mountain (1924)
Speech is civilization itself. The word, even the most contradictory word, preserves contact — it is silence which isolates.
The Magic Mountain (1924)
“Beer, tobacco, and music,” he went on. “Behold the Fatherland.”
The Magic Mountain (1924)
Disease was a perverse, a dissolute form of life.
The Magic Mountain (1924)
In effect it seemed to him that, though honor might possess certain advantages, yet shame had others, and not inferior: advantages, even, that were well-nigh boundless in their scope.
The Magic Mountain (1924)
Asien verschlingt uns. Wohin man blickt: tatarische Gesichter.
The Magic Mountain (1924)
What we call mourning for our dead is perhaps not so much grief at not being able to call them back as it is grief at not being able to want to do so.
The Magic Mountain (1924)
There is something suspicious about music, gentlemen. I insist that she is, by her nature, equivocal. I shall not be going too far in saying at once that she is politically suspect.
The Magic Mountain (1924)
Passionate — that means to live for the sake of living.
The Magic Mountain (1924)
Love for him, for the human body, was extremely humanitarian an interest and had more educational power than the whole teaching skills of the world!
The Magic Mountain (1924)
Hans Castorp loved music from his heart; it worked upon him much the same way as did his breakfast porter, with deeply soothing, narcotic effect, tempting him to doze.
The Magic Mountain (1924)
The ancients adorned their sarcophagi with the emblems of life and procreation, and even with obscene symbols; in the religions of antiquity the sacred and the obscene often lay very close together. These men knew how to pay homage to death. For death is worthy of homage as the cradle of life, as the womb of palingenesis.
The Magic Mountain (1924)
I never can understand how anyone can not smoke — it deprives a man of the best part of life … with a good cigar in his mouth a man is perfectly safe, nothing can touch him — literally.
The Magic Mountain (1924)
Two principles, according to the Settembrinian cosmogony, were in perpetual conflict for possession of the world: force and justice, tyranny and freedom, superstition and knowledge; the law of permanence and the law of change, of ceaseless fermentation issuing in progress.
The Magic Mountain (1924)
Our air up here is good for the disease — I mean good against the disease,... but it is also good for the disease.
The Magic Mountain (1924)
Time has no divisions to mark its passage, there is never a thunderstorm or blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year. Even when a new century begins it is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols.
The Magic Mountain (1924)