119 quotes
The Freudian theory is one of the most important foundation stones for an edifice to be built by future generations, the dwelling of a freer and wiser humanity.
Beauty can pierce one like pain.
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)
In certain respects, particularly economically, National-Socialism is nothing but bolshevism. These two are hostile brothers of whom the younger has learned everything from the older, the Russian excepting only morality.
The Coming Victory of Democracy (1938)
They sang their mysterious duo, sang of their nameless hope, their death-in-love, their union unending, lost forever in the embrace of night's magic kingdom. O sweet night, everlasting night of love! Land of blessedness whose frontiers are infinite!
Tristan (1902)
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)
The myth is the foundation of life; it is the timeless schema, the pious formula into which life flows when it reproduces its traits out of the unconscious.
Freud and the Future (1937)
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)
Plato’s insistence that philosophers should rule the state would create a dangerous Utopia if it merely implied that the ruler should be a philosopher. The philosopher must also be a ruler — for that, primarily, creates the relationship of mind and life which we call democratic.
The Coming Victory Of Democracy (1938)
The important thing for me, then, is not the "work," but my life. Life is not the means for the achievement of an esthetic ideal of perfection; on the contrary, the work is an ethical symbol of life.
Reflections of a Non-Political Man (1918)
Has the world ever been changed by anything save the thought and its magic vehicle the Word?
Freud and the Future (1937)
As a science of the unconscious it is a therapeutic method, in the grand style, a method overarching the individual case. Call this, if you choose, a poet's utopia.
Freud and the Future (1937)
In the Word is involved the unity of humanity, the wholeness of the human problem, which permits nobody to separate the intellectual and artistic from the political and social, and to isolate himself within the ivory tower of the "cultural" proper.
For all men of violence, tyrants, those who seek to stupefy and stultify the masses, and all those who are intent upon turning a nation into an unthinking war-machine in order to control free and thinking citizens — these necessarily despise humanity.
The Coming Victory Of Democracy (1938)
Cruelty is one of the chief ingredients of love, and divided about equally between the sexes: cruelty of lust, ingratitude, callousness, maltreatment, domination. The same is true of the passive qualities, patience under suffering, even pleasure in ill usage.
The Beloved Returns (1939)
Politics has been called the “art of the possible,” and it actually is a realm akin to art insofar as, like art, it occupies a creatively mediating position between spirit and life, the idea and reality.
It is a strange fact that freedom and equality, the two basic ideas of democracy, are to some extent contradictory. Logically considered, freedom and equality are mutually exclusive, just as society and the individual are mutually exclusive.
We, when we sow the seeds of doubt deeper than the most up-to-date and modish free-thought has ever dreamed of doing, we well know what we are about. Only out of radical skepsis, out of moral chaos, can the Absolute spring, the anointed Terror of which the time has need.
The Magic Mountain (1924)
It is probable that fascism will continue to prefer this kind of war to actual open warfare as long as possible, for a real war would soon reveal the important role which lies and deception play in the “totalitarian state.”
The Coming Victory Of Democracy (1938)