Kilchberg, Switzerland

Paul Thomas Mann was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate, known for his series of highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and novellas, noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual. His analysis and critique of the European and German soul used modernized German and Biblical stories, as well as the ideas of Goethe, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer.

His writing career began with a gig for the great satirical German weekly magazine Simplicissimus (just after it was launched in 1896). As I’m a fan of quotations, here are some I’ve gleaned from Mann… for the record:

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War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.

A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth.

Order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject.

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.

Every reasonable human being should be a moderate Socialist.

Has the world ever been changed by anything save the thought and its magic vehicle the Word?

I don’t think anyone is thinking long-term now.

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

Speech is civilization itself.

Time has no divisions to mark its passage, there is never a thunder-storm 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.

What a wonderful phenomenon it is, carefully considered, when the human eye, that jewel of organic structures, concentrates its moist brilliance on another human creature!