119 quotes
A man's dying is more the survivors' affair than his own.
The Magic Mountain (1924)
A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth.
My aversion from music rests on political grounds.
The Magic Mountain (1924)
This longing for the bliss of the commonplace.
Tonio Kröger (1902)
The beautiful word begets the beautiful deed.
The Magic Mountain (1924)
O scenes of the beautiful world! Never have you presented yourself to more appreciative eyes.
Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man (1954)
We are most likely to get angry and excited in our opposition to some idea when we ourselves are not quite certain of our own position, and are inwardly tempted to take the other side.
Democracy is timelessly human, and timelessness always implies a certain amount of potential youthfulness.
The Coming Victory of Democracy (1938)
What they, in their innocence, cannot comprehend is that a properly constituted, healthy, decent man never writes, acts, or composes.
Tonio Kröger (1902)
What is success? It is an inner, an indescribable force, resourcefulness, power of vision; a consciousness that I am, by my mere existence, exerting pressure on the movement of life about me.
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)
It had been a moving, tranquil apotheosis, immersed in the transfiguring sunset glow of decline and decay and extinction.
Tristan (1902)
Speech is civilization itself. The word, even the most contradictory word, preserves contact — it is silence which isolates.
The Magic Mountain (1924)
Why does almost everything seem to me like its own parody? Why must I think that almost all, no, all the methods and conventions of art today are good for parody only?
Doctor Faustus (1947)
Never had he felt the joy of the word more sweetly, never had he known so clearly that Eros dwells in language.
Death in Venice (1912)
“Beer, tobacco, and music,” he went on. “Behold the Fatherland.”
The Magic Mountain (1924)
War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.
This I Believe (1954)
Disease was a perverse, a dissolute form of life.
The Magic Mountain (1924)