It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.
Forbearance in the face of fate, beauty constant under torture, are not merely passive. They are a positive achievement, an explicit triumph.
He took in the squeaky music, the vulgar and pining melodies, because passion immobilizes good taste and seriously considers what soberly would be thought of as funny and to be resented.
Yes, they are carnal, both of them, love and death, and therein lies their terror and their great magic!
The Ladies Buddenbrook from Breite Strasse did not weep, however – it was not their custom. Their faces, a little less caustic than usual at least, expressed a gentle satisfaction at death’s impartiality.
A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.
Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous – to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd.
Is not the pastness of the past the more profound, the more legendary, the more immediately it falls before the present ?
Deep is the well of the past. Should we not call it bottomless?
Innate in nearly every artistic nature is a wanton, treacherous penchant for accepting injustice when it creates beauty and showing sympathy for and paying homage to aristocratic privilege.
Prayers and love are learned in the hour when prayer has become impossible and your heart has turned to stone.
Passionate—that means to live for the sake of living. But one knows that you all live for sake of experience. Passion, that is self-forgetfulness. But what you all want is self-enrichment.
Travelers prove their lack of education if they make fun of the customs and values of their hosts, and the qualities that do a person honour are many and varied.
At thirty a man steps out of the darkness and wasteland of preparation into active life it is the time to show oneself, the time of fulfillment.
I know I am talking nonsense, but I’d rather go rambling on, and partly expressing something I find it difficult to express, than to keep on transmitting faultless platitudes.
Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportianate, the absurd and the forbidden.
Discussions should always be held just before going to bed, your rear protected by sleep. How painful, after an intellectual conversation, to have to go about with your mind so stirred up.
The sweet spot is where duty and delight converge.
Order and simplification are the first steps towards mastery of a subject
How can I free myself from sexuality? Eat nothing but rice?
Opinions cannot survive if one has no chance to fight for them.
For the sake of goodness and love, man shall grant death no dominion over his thoughts.
Perfectionism, of course, was something which even as a young man he had come to see as the innermost essence of talent.
There are so many different kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst.
What they, in their innocence, cannot comprehend is that a properly constituted, healthy, decent man never writes, acts, or composes.
I tell them that if they will occupy themselves with the study of mathematics they will find in it the best remedy against the lusts of the flesh.
The perishableness of life…imparts value, dignity, interest to life.
But even those five-and-forty minutes were too long, the bored me –and boredom is the coldest thing in the world.
A man’s dying is more the survivors’ affair than his own.
Time cools time clarifies no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours.
Habituation is a falling asleep or fatiguing of the sense of time which explains why young years pass slowly while later life flings itself faster and faster upon its course.
If you are possessed by an idea you find it expressed everywhere you even smell it.
It is love not reason that is stronger than death.
He who loves the more is the inferior and must suffer.
A human being who is first of all an invalid is all body therein lies his inhumanity and his debasement.
Opinions cannot survive if one has no chance to fight for them.
Opinions cannot survive if one has no chance to fight for them.
If you are possessed by an idea you find it expressed everywhere you even smell it.
Human reason needs only to will more strongly than fate and she is fate.
What the collective age wants allows and approves is the perpetual holiday from the self.
No man remains quite what he was when he recognizes himself.
Time cools time clarifies no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours.
Speech is civilization itself. The word even the most contradictory word preserves contact – it is silence which isolates.
There is only one real misfortune: to forfeit one’s own good opinion of oneself. Lose your complacency, once betray your own self-contempt and the world will unhesitatingly endorse it.
For to be poised against fatality, to meet adverse conditions gracefully, is more than simple endurance; it is an act of aggression, a positive triumph.
For I must tell you that we artists cannot tread the path of Beauty without Eros keeping company with us and appointing himself as our guide.