A man's dying is more the survivors' affair than his own.Thomas Mann: The Magic Mountain
Fate
Human reason needs only to will more strongly than fate, and she is fate.Thomas Mann: The Magic Mountain
Love
It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.Thomas Mann: The Magic Mountain
Solitude and Loneliness
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.Thomas Mann: Death in Venice
Speech and Speakers
Speech is civilization itself. The word, even the most contradictious word, preserves contact—it is silence which isolates.Thomas Mann: The Magic Mountain
