German - Writer | June 6, 1875 - August 12, 1955
Order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject.
Thomas Mann
FirstMasteryOrderStepsSubject
People's behavior makes sense if you think about it in terms of their goals, needs, and motives.
GoalsPeopleThinkBehaviorYou
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.
FreedomEqualityIdeasDemocracyTwo
A man's dying is more his survivor's affair than his own.
ManSurvivorMoreDyingOwnAffair
For 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.
LifeFoundationOutTimelessMyth
We don't love qualities, we love persons; sometimes by reason of their defects as well as of their qualities.
LoveSometimesReasonWellQualities
A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.
LifeManPersonalIndividualOnly
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.
BeautyPoetrySolitudeBirthUs
Only he who desires is amiable and not he who is satiated.
OnlyWhoDesiresHeAmiable
A harmful truth is better than a useful lie.
TruthLieTruth IsBetterUseful
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.
LifeGoodBestManMouthSmoke
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.
TimeFireBeginningYearNewRing
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