119 quotes
An art whose medium is language will always show a high degree of critical creativeness, for speech is itself a critique of life: it names, it characterizes, it passes judgment, in that it creates.
Extraordinary creature! So close a friend, and yet so remote.
It is not easy to speak on the coming victory of democracy at a moment when the aggressive brutality of fascism seems to be so distressingly triumphant.
The Coming Victory Of Democracy (1938)
How else is the famous short story ‘A study in Abjection’ to be understood but as an outbreak of disgust against an age indecently undermined by psychology.
Death in Venice (1912)
If Goethe claimed towards the end of his life that every reasonable person is a moderate Liberal, then in our time one must say: Every reasonable person is a moderate Socialist.
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)
Freedom is a more complex and delicate thing than force. It is not as simple to live under as force is.
Beauty ... is the sole aspect of the spiritual which we can perceive through our senses.
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)
It is a pregnant complex, gleaming up from the unconscious, of mother-fixation, sexual desire, and fear.
Suffering and Greatness of Richard Wagner (1933)
Reduced to a miserable mass level, the level of a Hitler, German Romanticism broke out into hysterical barbarism.
Wagner's art is the most sensational self-portrayal and self-critique of German nature that it is possible to conceive.
Suffering and Greatness of Richard Wagner (1933)
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)
I have always been an admirer. I regard the gift of admiration as indispensable if one is to amount to something; I don't know where I would be without it.
Letter (1950)
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)
Socrates … said the subtlest thing of all: that the lover was nearer the divine than the beloved.