"I admire the proud and cold who go adventuring on the paths of great and demoniac beauty, and scorn "man" — but I do not envy them. For if anything is capable of making a poet out of a man of letters, it is this plebeian love of mine for the human, living, and commonplace. All warmth, all goodness, all humor is born of it, and it almost seems to me as if it were that love itself, of which it is written that a man might speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and yet without it be no more than sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
LGBT peopleNobel laureates in LiteratureEssayists from GermanyNovelists from GermanyAutobiographers from Germany
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Ch. 9, as translated by Bayard Quincy Morgan
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Thomas_Mann
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Thomas Mann
1875 – 1955
deutscher Schriftsteller
167 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Thomas Mann →
Related Quotes
"A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epo…"
"An art whose medium is language will always show a high degree of critical creativeness, for speech is itself a criti…"
"Everything is politics."
"I, for one, have never in my life come across a perfectly healthy human being."
"Only indifference is free. What is distinctive is never free, it is stamped with its own seal, conditioned and chained."
"There is both rhyme and reason in what I say, I have made a dream poem of humanity. I will cling to it. I will be goo…"
"Profundity must smile."
"It is not easy to speak on the coming victory of democracy at a moment when the aggressive brutality of fascism seems…"
"It is not good when people no longer believe in war. Pretty soon they no longer believe in many other things which th…"
"Order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject — the actual enemy is the unknown."