Thomas Mann
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"Paul Thomas Mann" was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and the 1929 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate. His highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and novellas are 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 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe/Goethe, Friedrich Nietzsche/Nietzsche and Arthur Schopenhauer/Schopenhauer. Mann was a member of the Hanseaten (class)/Hanseatic Mann family and portrayed his family and class in the novel Buddenbrooks. His older brother was the radical writer Heinrich Mann and three of his six children, Erika Mann, Klaus Mann and Golo Mann, also became important German writers. When Adolf Hitler/Hitler came to power in 1933, Mann fled to Switzerland. When World War II broke out in 1939, he immigrated to the United States, returning to Switzerland in 1952. Thomas Mann is one of the best-known exponents of the so-called Exilliteratur.

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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.

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.

It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.

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.

War is a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.

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

No man remains quite what he was when he recognizes himself.

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

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.

All interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life.

For one human being instinctively feels respect and love for another human being so long as he does not know him well enough to judge him; and that he does not, the craving he feels is evidence.

A man's dying is more the survivors' affair than his own.

Speech is civilization itself. The word... preserves contact / it is silence which isolates.

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