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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.

— Thomas Mann The Beloved Returns (1939)

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More quotes by Thomas Mann

I stand between two worlds, am at home in neither, and in consequence have rather a hard time of it.

Tonio Kröger (1902)

The writer's joy is the thought that can become emotion, the emotion that can wholly become a thought.

Death in Venice (1912)

Time cools, time clarifies, no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours.

The Magic Mountain (1924)

Order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject — the actual enemy is the unknown.

The Magic Mountain (1924)

If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it.

Tonio Kröger (1902)

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Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Thomas Mann (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.