Only love, and not reason, yields kind thoughts.

Technology and comfort - having those, people speak of culture, but do not have it.

Order and simplification are the first steps towards mastery of a subject

I have always been an admirer, I regard the gift of admiration as indispensable if one is to amount to something; I don't know where I would be without it.

Forbearance in the face of fate, beauty constant under torture, are not merely passive. They are a positive achievement, an explicit triumph.

…What our age needs, what it demands, what it will create for itself, is—terror.

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.

What good would politics be, if it didn’t give everyone the opportunity to make moral compromises.

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!

Whoever loves the more is at a disadvantage and must suffer

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.

A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

Genius is a form of the life force that is deeply versed in illness, that both draws creatively from it and creates through it.

What pleases the public is lively and vivid delineation which makes no demands on the intellect; but passionate and absolutist youth can only be enthralled by a problem.

What an absurd torture for the artist to know that an audience identifies him with a work that, within himself, he has moved beyond and that was merely a game played with something in which he does not believe.

Solitude produces originality, bold & astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportionate, the absurd, and the forbidden.

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.

Speech is civilization itself. The word, even the most contradictory word, preserves contact—it is silence which isolates.

One always needs to be reminded; one is by no means always in possession of one’s whole self. Our consciousness is feeble; only in moments of unusual clarity and vision do we really know about ourselves.

Opinions cannot survive if one has no chance to fight for them.

Is not life in itself a thing of goodness, irrespective of whether the course it takes for us can be called a 'happy' one?

Mere knowledge of human psychology would in itself infallibly make us despondent if we were not cheered and kept alert by the satisfaction of expressing it.

Only death dignifies our sufferings in the eyes of others.

Myth is the foundation of life; it is the timeless pattern, the pious formula, into which life flows when it reproduces its traits out of the unconscious.

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.

Is not the pastness of the past the more profound, the more legendary, the more immediately it falls before the present ?

Rather babble away and at least partially express something difficult than reproduce impeccable clich s

A stimulus is a stimulus. The body doesn't give a damn about the meaning of the stimulus. Whether minnows or communion, the sebaceous glands stand up erect.

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.

Because man loves and honors man as long as he is not able to judge him, and desire is a product of lacking knowledge.

Čudno je to. Kad čoveka obuzme neka misao, onda je nalazi svuda, čak je i miriše u vetru.

What they, in their innocence, cannot comprehend is that a properly constituted, healthy, decent man never writes, acts, or composes.

...only the exhaustive can be truly interesting.

You will lead, you will strike up the march of the future, boys will swear by your name, and thanks to your madness they will no longer need to be mad.

Whoever is unable to stand up for an ideal with his person, his arm, his blood, is unworthy of that ideal, and no matter how intellectual one may become, what matters is that one remains a man.

Even the piquant can forfeit popularity if tied to something intellectual.

...when life still hesitates to touch us, when neither duty nor guilt dares lay a hand upon us

How can I free myself from sexuality? Eat nothing but rice?

Every reasonable human being should be a moderate Socialist.

To find peace in the presence of the faultless is the desire of the one who seeks excellence; and is not nothingness a form of perfection?

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.

Passion-means to live for life's sake but I am well aware you Germans live for the sake of experience. Passion means to forget ones self. But you do things in order to enrich yourselves.

The sweet spot is where duty and delight converge.

The happiness of writers is the thought that can be entirely emotion and the emotion that can be entirely thought. Such a pulsing thought, such a

Man loves and honors man as long as he is not able to judge him, and desire is a product of lacking knowledge.

A human being lives out not only his personal life as an individual, but also, consciously or subconsciously, the lives of his epoch and his contemporaries

But what would be our readers’ reaction if we simply refused to get to the bottom of that question?

For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts.

Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty, unfamiliar and perilous.

Almost every artistic nature is born with a revealing connoisseurial tendency that appreciates injustice so long as it results in beauty and applauds, even worships aristocratic privilege.