Thomas Mann

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

“It didn’t cost anything, either,” remarked Herr Gratjens drily

It brings joy and happiness to others, but to me always only pain and sorrow.

“Oh,” said Joachim, “I hear it every day, you don’t need to describe it to me.”

Thus she went about in the town like a little queen; and like a queen, she was kind or cruel to her subjects, as the whim seized her.

There are marriages the origin of which not even the most practised literary imagination could possibly conceive.

Why not? One must call things by their right names; life is enriched and ennobled thereby. I too have my vices.

Tony saw how her Father, sitting next to her, raised his hand, as though he would say, “Not so hard.”

No one could be less attached, freer, less interested.

“Is your summer over now?” Hans Castorp asked his cousin, in bitter irony.

“Oh, if I’m marrying for the privilege of running up and down stairs⁠—!”

A bit of falsehood, they think, belongs to beauty.

Ah, time is a riddling thing, and hard it is to expound its essence!

“Lord, Herr Consul, I say we wants a republic; that’s wat I be sayin’.”

You are somebody and I am somebody, each in his own way.

Thus ungrateful is immature youth! It takes all that is offered, and bites the hand that feeds it.

She had, unconsciously, the feeling that any trait of hers, no matter of what kind, was a family tradition and therefore worthy of respect.

Hypocrisy or self-mastery! It is a choice between one word and the other.

And waiting means hurrying on ahead, it means regarding time and the present moment not as a boon, but an obstruction

Did you know one can be a great man, even in a small place; a Caesar even in a little commercial town on the Baltic?