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Thomas Mann

Paul Thomas Mann (6 June 1875 – 12 August 1955) was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate, known for his series of highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and mid-length stories, noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual.

Quotes

 * To place Russian communism on the same moral level with Nazi fascism, because both are totalitarian, is, at best, superficial, in the worse case it is fascism. He who insists on this equality may be a democrat; in truth and in his heart, he is already a fascist, and will surely fight fascism with insincerity and appearance, but with complete hatred only communism.
 * Essays, ed. by H.Kurzke, Frankfurt 1986, vol. 2, p. 311

 * I think of my suffering, of the problem of my suffering. What am I suffering from? From knowledge — is it going to destroy me? What am I suffering from? From sexuality — is it going to destroy me? How I hate it, this knowledge which forces even art to join it! How I hate it, this sensuality, which claims everything fine and good is its consequence and effect. Alas, it is the poison that lurks in everything fine and good! — How am I to free myself of knowledge? By religion? How am I to free myself of sexuality? By eating rice?
 * Letter from Naples, Italy to Otto Grautoff (1896); as quoted in A Gorgon's Mask: The Mother in Thomas Mann's Fiction (2005) by Lewis A. Lawson, p. 34

 * Here and there, among a thousand other peddlers, are slyly hissing dealers who urge you to come along with them to allegedly "very beautiful" girls, and not only to girls. They keep at it, walk alongside, praising their wares until you answer roughly. They don't know that you have resolved to eat nothing but rice just to escape from sexuality!
 * Letter from Naples, Italy to Otto Grautoff (1896); as quoted in A Gorgon's Mask: The Mother in Thomas Mann's Fiction (2005) by Lewis A. Lawson, p. 35

 * We are most likely to get angry and excited in our opposition to some idea when we ourselves are not quite certain of our own position, and are inwardly tempted to take the other side.
 * Buddenbrooks [Buddenbrooks: Verfall einer Familie, Roman] (1901). Pt 8, Ch. 2

 * It is as though something had begun to slip – as though I haven't the firm grip I had on events. – What is success? It is an inner, an indescribable force, resourcefulness, power of vision; a consciousness that I am, by my mere existence, exerting pressure on the movement of life about me. It is my belief in the adaptability of life to my own ends. Fortune and success lie within ourselves. We must hold them firmly – deep within us. For as soon as something begins to slip, to relax, to get tired, within us, then everything without us will rebel and struggle to withdraw from our influence. One thing follows another, blow after blow – and the man is finished.
 * Buddenbrooks [Buddenbrooks: Verfall einer Familie, Roman] (1901). Pt 7, Ch. 6

 * Beauty can pierce one like pain.
 * Buddenbrooks [Buddenbrooks: Verfall einer Familie, Roman], Pt 11, Ch. 2

 * That daily the night falls; that over stresses and torments, cares and sorrows the blessing of sleep unfolds, stilling and quenching them; that every anew this draught of refreshment and lethe is offered to our parching lips, ever after the battle this mildness laves our shaking limbs, that from it, purified from sweat and dust and blood, strengthened, renewed, rejuvenated, almost innocent once more, almost with pristine courage and zeal we may go forth again — these I hold to be the benignest, the most moving of all the great facts of life.
 * "Sleep, Sweet Sleep" [Süßer Schlaf] first published in Neue Freie Presse [Vienna] (30 May 1909), as translated by Helen T. Knopf in Past Masters and Other Papers (1933), p. 269

 * I met the New Passion, then, as democracy, as political enlightenment and the humanitarianism of happiness. I understood its efforts to be toward the politicization of everything ethos; its aggressiveness and doctrinary intolerance consisted – I experienced them personally – in its denial and slander of every nonpolitical ethos. “Mankind” as humanitarian internationalism; “reason” and “virtue” as the radical republic; intellect as a thing between a Jacobin club and Freemasonry; art as social literature and maliciously seductive rhetoric in the service of social “desirability”; here we have the New Passion in its purest political form as I saw it close up. I admit that this is a special, extremely romanticized form of it.
 * Reflections of a Non-Political Man [Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen] (1918)

 * The important thing for me, then, is not the "work," but my life. Life is not the means for the achievement of an esthetic ideal of perfection; on the contrary, the work is an ethical symbol of life.
 * Reflections of a Non-Political Man [Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen] (1918)

 * He is no longer with me—by my orders—but then that is merel the carrying-out of an order, after all a kind of negative being-with-me, as he would say. As for any independent life which Bashan might lead without me during these hours—that is not to be thought of.
 * Herr und Hund (A Man and his Dog) (1918)

 * Extraordinary creature! So close a friend, and yet so remote.
 * Herr und Hund (A Man and his Dog) (1918)

 * The meeting in the open of two dogs, strangers to each other, is one of the most painful, thrilling, and pregnant of all conceivable encounters; it is surrounded by an atmosphere of the last canniness, presided over by a constraint for which I have no preciser name; they simply cannot pass each other, their mutual embarrassment is frightful to behold.
 * Herr und Hund (A Man and his Dog) (1918)

 * A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth.
 * Essay on Freud (16 May 1929)

 * I have an epic, not a dramatic nature. My disposition and my desires call for peace to spin my thread, for a steady rhythm in life and art.
 * Nobel Banquet Speech (10 December 1929)

 * This fantastic state of mind, of a humanity that has outrun its ideas, is matched by a political scene in the grotesque style, with Salvation Army methods, hallelujahs and bell-ringing and dervishlike repetition of monotonous catchwords, until everybody foams at the mouth. Fanaticism turns into a means of salvation, enthusiasm into epileptic ecstasy, politics becomes an opiate for the masses, a proletarian eschatology; and reason veils her face.
 * On German fascism, in "An Appeal to Reason" ["Deutsche Ansprache. Ein Appell an die Vernunft"] in Berliner Tageblatt (18 October 1930); as translated by Helen T. Lowe-Porter in Order of the Day, Political Essays and Speeches of Two Decades (1942), p. 57

 * The deep conviction . . . that nothing good for Germany or the world can come out of the present German regime, has made me avoid the country in whose spiritual tradition I am more deeply rooted than are those who for three years have been trying to find courage enough to declare before the world that I am not a German. And I feel to the bottom of my heart that I have done right in the eyes of my contemporaries and of posterity.
 * Responding to anti-semitic propaganda and to criticisms of German writers living in exile during the early years of the Nazi regime in Germany, as quoted in "Homage to Thomas Mann" in The New Republic (1 April 1936)

 * In the Word is involved the unity of humanity, the wholeness of the human problem, which permits nobody to separate the intellectual and artistic from the political and social, and to isolate himself within the ivory tower of the "cultural" proper.
 * Letter to the dean of the Philosophical Faculty, Bonn University (January 1937)

 * Democracy is timelessly human, and timelessness always implies a certain amount of potential youthfulness.
 * The Coming Victory of Democracy (1938), p. 14, translated by Agnes E. Meyer, Knopf (1938)

 * In certain respects, particularly economically, National-Socialism is nothing but bolshevism. These two are hostile brothers of whom the younger has learned everything from the older, the Russian excepting only morality.
 * The Coming Victory of Democracy (1938), p. 14, translated by Agnes E. Meyer, Knopf (1938)

 * This was love at first sight, love everlasting: a feeling unknown, unhoped for, unexpected — in so far as it could be a matter of conscious awareness; it took entire possession of him, and he understood, with joyous amazement, that this was for life.
 * "Early Sorrow" in Tellers of Tales : 100 Short Stories from the United States, England, France, Russia and Germany edited by William Somerset Maugham (1939), p. 884

 * The Freudian theory is one of the most important foundation stones for an edifice to be built by future generations, the dwelling of a freer and wiser humanity.
 * As quoted in The New York Times (21 June 1939)

 * Unhappy German nation, how do you like the Messianic role allotted to you, not by God, nor by destiny, but by a handful of perverted and bloody-minded men?
 * "This War" (1939); also in Order of the Day'' (1942)

 * 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.
 * Speech, "The War and the Future" (1940); published in Order of the Day (1942)

 * What we call National-Socialism is the poisonous perversion of ideas which have a long history in German intellectual life.
 * Speech, "The War and the Future" (1940); published in Order of the Day (1942)

 * An art whose medium is language will always show a high degree of critical creativeness, for speech is itself a critique of life: it names, it characterizes, it passes judgment, in that it creates.
 * Speech at the Prussian Academy of Art in Berlin (22 January 1929); also in Essays of Three Decades (1942)

 * A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
 * Essays of Three Decades (1942)

 * Politics has been called the “art of the possible,” and it actually is a realm akin to art insofar as, like art, it occupies a creatively mediating position between spirit and life, the idea and reality.
 * Speech at the US Library of Congress (29 May 1945); published as "Germany and the Germans" ["Deutschland und die Deutschen"] in Die Neue Rundschau [Stockholm] (October 1945), p. 58, as translated by Helen T. Lowe-Porter

 * Reduced to a miserable mass level, the level of a Hitler, German Romanticism broke out into hysterical barbarism.
 * Speech at the US Library of Congress (29 May 1945); published as "Germany and the Germans" ["Deutschland und die Deutschen"] in Die Neue Rundschau [Stockholm] (October 1945), p. 58, as translated by Helen T. Lowe-Porter

 * If Goethe claimed towards the end of his life that every reasonable person is a moderate Liberal, then in our time one must say: Every reasonable person is a moderate Socialist.
 * As quoted in The New York Times (18 June 1950); also in Thomas Mann: A Critical Study (1971) by R. J. Hollingdale, Ch. 2

 * 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.
 * Letter, (1950); as quoted in Thomas Mann — The Birth of Criticism (1987) by Marcel Reich-Ranicki

 * War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.
 * As quoted in This I Believe (1954), by Edward R. Murrow, p. 16

 * The positive thing about the sceptic is that he considers everything possible!
 * Attributed as a statement of Mann in the 1920s in Chariots of the Gods? : Unsolved Mysteries of the Past (1969) by Erich von Däniken, as translated by Michael Heron

 * It is not good when people no longer believe in war. Pretty soon they no longer believe in many other things which they absolutely must believe in if they are to be decent men.
 * Quoted in Survey of Contemporary Literature (1977) by Frank Northen Magill, p. 4263

 * Only indifference is free. What is distinctive is never free, it is stamped with its own seal, conditioned and chained.
 * As quoted in Sculpting in Time (1996), by Andrei Tarkovsky, p. 56

 * I have read your book and its terrible documentation with deepest emotion. I cannot describe the mixed feeling of abhorrence and loathing which has filled my heart while perusing these records of human degradation and abominable cruelty. . . . To keep quiet would serve only the moral indifference of the world . . . You have done your duty in publishing this book and bringing these facts to light.
 * Cited in Awake! magazine, 1995, 8/22; article: The Evils of Nazism Exposed.
 * In 1933, The Golden Age carried the first of many reports of the existence of concentration camps in Germany. In 1938, Jehovah's Witnesses published the book Crusade Against Christianity, in French, German, and Polish. It carefully documented the vicious Nazi attacks on the Witnesses and included diagrams of the Sachsenhausen and Esterwegen concentration camps.

Tristan (1902)

 * It often happens that an old family, with traditions that are entirely practical, sober and bourgeois, undergoes in its declining days a kind of artistic transfiguration.
 * Ch. 7

 * They sang their mysterious duo, sang of their nameless hope, their death-in-love, their union unending, lost forever in the embrace of night's magic kingdom. O sweet night, everlasting night of love! Land of blessedness whose frontiers are infinite!
 * Ch. 8

 * It had been a moving, tranquil apotheosis, immersed in the transfiguring sunset glow of decline and decay and extinction. An old family, already grown too weary and too noble for life and action, had reached the end of its history, and its last utterances were sounds of music: a few violin notes, full of the sad insight which is ripeness for death.
 * Ch. 10

Tonio Kröger (1903)
See also Tonio Kröger

 * If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it.
 * Variant translation: It is strange. If an idea gains control of you, you will find it expressed everywhere, you will actually smell it in the wind.
 * As translated by Bayard Quincy Morgan

 * What they, in their innocence, cannot comprehend is that a properly constituted, healthy, decent man never writes, acts, or composes.
 * "Tonio Kröger" on general opinions about artists.

 * This longing for the bliss of the commonplace.
 * Ch. 4, and also in Ch. 9, as translated by David Luke

 * He remembered the dissolute adventures in which his senses, his nervous system and his mind had indulged; he saw himself corroded by irony and intellect, laid waste and paralyzed by insight, almost exhausted by the fevers and chills of creation, helplessly and contritely tossed to and fro between gross extremes, between saintly austerity and lust — oversophisticated and impoverished, worn out by cold, rare artificial ecstasies, lost, ravaged, racked and sick — and he sobbed with remorse and nostalgia.
 * Ch. 8, as translated by David Luke

 * I stand between two worlds, am at home in neither, and in consequence have rather a hard time of it. You artists call me a commoner, and commoners feel tempted to arrest me ... I do not know which wounds me more bitterly. Commoners are stupid; but you worshippers of beauty who call me phlegmatic and without yearning, ought to reflect that there is an artistry so deep, so primordial and elemental, that no yearning seems to it sweeter and more worthy of tasting than that for the raptures of common-placeness.
 * Ch. 9, as translated by Bayard Quincy Morgan

 * 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.
 * Ch. 9, as translated by Bayard Quincy Morgan

 * What I have done is nothing, not much — as good as nothing. I shall do better things, Lisaveta — this is a promise. While I am writing, the sea's roar is coming up to me, and I close my eyes. I am looking into an unborn and shapeless world that longs to be called to life and order, I am looking into a throng of phantoms of human forms which beckon me to conjure them and set them free: some of them tragic, some of them ridiculous, and some that are both at once — and to these I am very devoted. But my deepest and most secret love belongs to the blond and blue-eyed, the bright-spirited living ones, the happy, amiable, and commonplace. Do not speak lightly of this love, Lisaveta; it is good and fruitful. There is longing in it and melancholy envy, and a tiny bit of contempt, and an unalloyed chaste blissfulness.
 * Ch. 9, as translated by Bayard Quincy Morgan
 * Variant translation: But my deepest and most secret love belongs to the fair-haired and the blue-eyed, the bright children of life, the happy, the charming and the ordinary.
 * Ch. 9, as translated by David Luke

Death in Venice (1912)

 * Der Tod in Venedig, originally published in Die Neue Rundschau 23 (Oct-Nov 1912)
 * See also Death in Venice

 * But he would “stay the course” — it was his favorite motto.
 * The disposition of the main character "Gustav Aschenbach", Ch. 2, as translated by David Luke

 * Hidden away amongst Aschenbach's writing was a passage directly asserting that nearly all the great things that exist owe their existence to a defiant despite: it is despite grief and anguish, despite poverty, loneliness, bodily weakness, vice and passion and a thousand inhibitions, that they have come into being at all. But this was more than an observation, it was an experience, it was positively the formula of his life and his fame, the key to his work.
 * Ch. 2, as translated by David Luke

 * The new hero-type favored by Aschenbach, and recurring in his books in a multiplicity of individual variants, had already been remarked upon at an early stage by a shrewd commentator, who had described his conception as that of “an intellectual and boyish manly virtue, that of a youth who clenches his teeth in proud shame and stands calmly on as the swords and spears pass through his body … the figure of Saint Sebastian is the most perfect symbol if not of art in general, then certainly of the kind of art in question.
 * Ch. 2, as translated by David Luke

 * Gustav Aschenbach was the writer who spoke for all those who work on the brink of exhaustion, who labor and are heavy-laden, who are worn out already but still stand upright, all those moralists of achievement who are slight of stature and scanty of resources, but who yet, by some ecstasy of the will and by wise husbandry, manage at least for a time to force their work into a semblance of greatness.
 * Ch. 2, as translated by David Luke

 * Was it an intellectual consequence of this ‘rebirth,’ of this new dignity and rigor, that, at about the same time, his sense of beauty was observed to undergo an almost excessive resurgence, that his style took on the noble purity, simplicity and symmetry that were to set upon all his subsequent works that so evident and evidently intentional stamp of the classical master.
 * Ch. 2, as translated by David Luke

 * How else is the famous short story ‘A study in Abjection’ to be understood but as an outbreak of disgust against an age indecently undermined by psychology.
 * On a short story of the character, "Gustav Aschenbach". Ch. 2, as translated by David Luke

 * How strange a vehicle it is, coming down unchanged from times of old romance, and so characteristically black, the way no other thing is black except a coffin — a vehicle evoking lawless adventures in the plashing stillness of night, and still more strongly evoking death itself, the bier, the dark obsequies, the last silent journey!
 * Ch. 3, as translated by David Luke

 * With astonishment Aschenbach noticed that the boy was entirely beautiful. His countenance, pale and gracefully reserved, was surrounded by ringlets of honey-colored hair, and with its straight nose, its enchanting mouth, its expression of sweet and divine gravity, it recalled Greek sculpture of the noblest period.
 * Ch. 3, as translated by David Luke

 * There were profound reasons for his attachment to the sea: he loved it because as a hard-working artist he needed rest, needed to escape from the demanding complexity of phenomena and lie hidden on the bosom of the simple and tremendous; because of a forbidden longing deep within him that ran quite contrary to his life's task and was for that very reason seductive, a longing for the unarticulated and immeasurable, for eternity, for nothingness. To rest in the arms of perfection is the desire of any man intent upon creating excellence; and is not nothingness a form of perfection?
 * Ch. 3, as translated by David Luke

 * The writer's joy is the thought that can become emotion, the emotion that can wholly become a thought.
 * Ch. 4, as translated by David Luke

 * Never had he felt the joy of the word more sweetly, never had he known so clearly that Eros dwells in language.
 * Ch. 4, as translated by David Luke

 * This was Venice, the flattering and suspect beauty — this city, half fairy tale and half tourist trap, in whose insalubrious air the arts once rankly and voluptuously blossomed, where composers have been inspired to lulling tones of somniferous eroticism.
 * Ch. 5, as translated by David Luke

 * 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.
 * Ch. 5, as translated by David Luke

The Magic Mountain (1924)

 * Der Zauberberg (1929), using quotes primarily from the translation of Helen T. Lowe-Porter (1955)

 * Space, like time, engenders forgetfulness; but it does so by setting us bodily free from our surroundings and giving us back our primitive, unattached state. Yes, it can even, in the twinkling of an eye, make something like a vagabond of the pedant and Philistine. Time, we say, is Lethe; but change of air is a similar draught, and, if it works less thoroughly, does so more quickly.
 * Ch. 1

 * Psycho-analyses — how disgusting.
 * "Hans Castorp" in Ch. 1

 * I, for one, have never in my life come across a perfectly healthy human being.
 * The psychoanalyst "Dr. Krokowski" in Ch. 1

 * A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.
 * Ch. 2, “At Tienappels’,” (1924), trans. by H.T. Lowe-Porter (1928).

 * Hans Castorp loved music from his heart; it worked upon him much the same way as did his breakfast porter, with deeply soothing, narcotic effect, tempting him to doze.
 * Ch. 3

 * I never can understand how anyone can not smoke — it deprives a man of the best part of life … with a good cigar in his mouth a man is perfectly safe, nothing can touch him — literally.
 * Ch. 3

 * In effect it seemed to him that, though honor might possess certain advantages, yet shame had others, and not inferior: advantages, even, that were well-nigh boundless in their scope.
 * Ch. 3

 * One always has the idea of a stupid man as perfectly healthy and ordinary, and of illness as making one refined and clever and unusual.
 * Ch. 4

 * Placet experiri
 * Latin phrase meaning "It pleases to experiment", Ch. 4

 * “Beer, tobacco, and music,” he went on. “Behold the Fatherland.”
 * "Herr Settembrini" commenting on Germany, in Ch. 4

 * There is something suspicious about music, gentlemen. I insist that she is, by her nature, equivocal. I shall not be going too far in saying at once that she is politically suspect.
 * Ch. 4

 * My aversion from music rests on political grounds.
 * Ch. 4

 * I love and reverence the Word, the bearer of the spirit, the tool and gleaming ploughshare of progress.
 * Settembrini's view of literature, Ch. 4

 * "Love as a force contributory to disease."
 * The title of "Dr. Krokowski" lectures. Ch. 4

 * This conflict between the powers of love and chastity ... it ended apparently in the triumph of chastity. Love was suppressed, held in darkness and chains, by fear, conventionality, aversion, or a tremulous yearning to be pure.... But this triumph of chastity was only an apparent, a pyrrhic victory. It would break through the ban of chastity, it would emerge — if in a form so altered as to be unrecognizable.
 * Ch. 4

 * It seemed that at the end of the lecture Dr. Krokowski was making propaganda for psycho-analysis; with open arms he summoned all and sundry to come unto him. "Come unto me," he was saying, though not in those words, " come unto me, all ye who are weary and heavy-laden." And he left no doubt of his conviction that all those present were weary and heavy-laden. He spoke of secret suffering, of shame and sorrow, of the redeeming power of the analytic. He advocated the bringing of light into the unconscious mind and explained how the abnormality was metamorphosed into the conscious emotion; he urged them to have confidence; he promised relief.
 * Ch. 4

 * Two principles, according to the Settembrinian cosmogony, were in perpetual conflict for possession of the world: force and justice, tyranny and freedom, superstition and knowledge; the law of permanence and the law of change, of ceaseless fermentation issuing in progress.
 * Ch. 4

 * The beautiful word begets the beautiful deed.
 * Ch. 4
 * Writing well was almost the same as thinking well, and thinking well was the next thing to acting well. All moral discipline, all moral perfection derived from the soul of literature, from the soul of human dignity, which was the moving spirit of both humanity and politics. Yes, they were all one, one and the same force, one and the same idea, and all of them could be comprehended in one single word... The word was — civilization!
 * Ch. 4

 * Frau Stöhr ... began to talk about how fascinating it was to cough.... Sneezing was much the same thing. You kept on wanting to sneeze until you simply couldn't stand it any longer; you looked as if you were tipsy; you drew a couple of breaths, then out it came, and you forgot everything else in the bliss of the sensation. Sometimes the explosion repeated itself two or three times. That was the sort of pleasure life gave you free of charge.
 * Ch. 4

 * Disease makes men more physical, it leaves them nothing but body.
 * Ch. 4

 * Our air up here is good for the disease — I mean good against the disease,... but it is also good for the disease.
 * Ch. 4

 * A black pall, you know, with a silver cross on it, or R.I.P. — requiescat in pace — you know. That seems to me the most beautiful expression — I like it much better than ‘He is a jolly good fellow,’ which is simply rowdy.
 * Ch. 5

 * Six months at most after they get here, these young people — and they are mostly young who come — have lost every idea they had, except flirtation and temperature.
 * Settembrini on the Magic Mountain Society, in Ch. 5

 * It is a cruel atmosphere down there, cruel and ruthless.
 * Hans Castorp on the world outside the sanatorium, in Ch. 5

 * The only religious way to think of death is as part and parcel of life; to regard it, with the understanding and the emotions, as the inviolable condition of life.
 * Ch. 5

 * The ancients adorned their sarcophagi with the emblems of life and procreation, and even with obscene symbols; in the religions of antiquity the sacred and the obscene often lay very close together. These men knew how to pay homage to death. For death is worthy of homage as the cradle of life, as the womb of palingenesis.
 * Ch. 5

 * Irony, forsooth! Guard yourself, Engineer, from the sort of irony that thrives up here; guard yourself altogether from taking on their mental attitude! Where irony is not a direct and classic device of oratory, not for a moment equivocal to a healthy mind, it makes for depravity, it becomes a drawback to civilization, an unclean traffic with the forces of reaction, vice and materialism.
 * Ch. 5

 * Paradox is the poisonous flower of quietism, the iridescent surface of the rotting mind, the greatest depravity of all.
 * Ch. 5

 * Analysis as an instrument of enlightenment and civilization is good, in so far as it shatters absurd convictions, acts as a solvent upon natural prejudices, and undermines authority; good, in other words, in that it sets free, refines, humanizes, makes slaves ripe for freedom. But it is bad, very bad, in so far as it stands in the way of action, cannot shape the vital forces, maims life at its roots. Analysis can be a very unappetizing affair, as much so as death.
 * Ch. 5

 * Time has no divisions to mark its passage, there is never a thunderstorm 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.
 * Ch. 5

 * Order and simplification are the first steps toward the mastery of a subject — the actual enemy is the unknown.
 * Ch. 5

 * Asien verschlingt uns. Wohin man blickt: tatarische Gesichter.
 * Asia surrounds us — wherever one's glance rests, a Tartar physiognomy.
 * Variant translation: Asia devours us. Wherever one looks: Tartar faces.
 * Settembrini in Ch. 5

 * What was life? It was warmth, the warmth generated by a form-preserving instability, a fever of matter, which accompanied the process of ceaseless decay and repair of protein molecules that were too impossibly ingenious in structure.
 * Ch. 5

 * Disease was a perverse, a dissolute form of life.
 * Ch. 5

 * Le corps, l'amour, la mort, ces trois ne font qu'un. Car le corps, c'est la maladie et la volupté, et c'est lui qui fait la mort, oui, ils sont charnels tous deux, l'amour et la mort, et voilà leur terreur et leur grande magie!
 * Rough translation of this passage written in French: The body, love, death, these three are just one. For the body, this is the disease and exquisite delight, and this that does die, yes, they are carnal both of them, love and death, and thus their terror and their great magic!
 * Hans Castorp to Chauchat, in French, Ch. 5

 * L’amour pour lui, pour le corps humain, c’est de même un intérêt extrêmement humanitaire et une puissance plus éducative que toute la pédagogie du monde!
 * Love for him, for the human body, was extremely humanitarian an interest and had more educational power than the whole teaching skills of the world!
 * Ch. 5

 * Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.
 * Ch. 6, section, A Good Soldier as translated by Woods (1996), p. 506

 * Human reason needs only to will more strongly than fate, and she is fate.
 * Ch. 6

 * Opinions cannot survive if one has no chance to fight for them.
 * Ch. 6

 * All interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life.
 * Ch. 6

 * The invention of printing and the Reformation are and remain the two outstanding services of central Europe to the cause of humanity.
 * Ch. 6

 * 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 good. I will let death have no mastery over my thoughts. For therein lies goodness and love of humankind, and in nothing else.
 * Ch. 6; variant translation: I will let death have no mastery over my thoughts! For therein, and in nothing else, lies goodness and love of humankind.

 * Love stands opposed to death. It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death. Only love, not reason, gives sweet thoughts. And from love and sweetness alone can form come: form and civilization, friendly, enlightened, beautiful human intercourse — always in silent recognition of the blood sacrifice.
 * Ch. 6

 * I will keep faith with death in my heart, yet will remember that faith with death and the dead is only wickedness and dark voluptuousness and enmity against humankind, if it is given power over our thought and contemplation. For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts. And with that, I wake up.
 * Ch. 6

 * Everything is politics.
 * Ch. 6

 * Speech is civilization itself. The word, even the most contradictory word, preserves contact — it is silence which isolates.
 * Ch. 6

 * A man's dying is more the survivors' affair than his own.
 * Ch. 6

 * Was wir Trauer nennen, ist vielleicht nicht sowohl der Schmerz über die Unmöglichkeit, unsere Toten ins Leben kehren zu sehen, als darüber, dies gar nicht wünschen zu können.
 * Translation: What we call mourning for our dead is perhaps not so much grief at not being able to call them back as it is grief at not being able to want to do so.
 * Ch. 7

 * Time cools, time clarifies, no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours. In the early dawn, standing weapon in hand, neither of the combatants would be the same man as on the evening of the quarrel. They would be going through it, if at all, mechanically, in obedience to the demands of honour, not, as they would have at first, of their own free will, desire, and conviction; and such a denial of their actual selves in favour of their past ones, it must somehow be possible to prevent.
 * Ch. 7

 * '''The purifying, healing influence of literature, the dissipating of passions by knowledge and the written word, literature as the path to understanding, forgiveness and love, the redeeming might of the word, the literary spirit as the noblest manifestation of the spirit of man, the writer as perfected type, as saint.
 * Ch. 7

 * Absolutely everything beloved and cherished of the bourgeoisie, the conservative, the cowardly, and the impotent — the State, family life, secular art and science — was consciously or unconsciously hostile to the religious idea, to the Church, whose innate tendency and permanent aim was the dissolution of all existing worldly orders, and the reconstitution of society after the model of the ideal, the communistic City of God.
 * Naphta in Ch. 7

 * We, when we sow the seeds of doubt deeper than the most up-to-date and modish free-thought has ever dreamed of doing, we well know what we are about. Only out of radical skepsis, out of moral chaos, can the Absolute spring, the anointed Terror of which the time has need.
 * Ch. 7

 * Passionate — that means to live for the sake of living. But one knows that you all live for the sake of experience. Passion, that is self-forgetfulness. But what you all want is self-enrichment. C'est ça. You don't realize what revolting egoism it is, and that one day it will make you the enemies of the human race.

Suffering and Greatness of Richard Wagner (1933)

 * "Leiden und Größe Richard Wagners" in Die Neue Rundschau, Jahrgang 44, Heft 4 (April 1933), as translated by Helen T. Lowe-Porter in Essays by Thomas Mann (1957), p. 199

 * He was all for catharsis and purification, he dreamed of an aesthetic consecration that should cleanse society of luxury, the greed of gold and all unloveliness.

 * It is a pregnant complex, gleaming up from the unconscious, of mother-fixation, sexual desire, and fear.

 * What was it that drove these thousands into the arms of his art — what but the blissfully sensuous, searing, sense-consuming, intoxicating, hypnotically caressing, heavily upholstered — in a word, the luxurious quality of his music?

 * Wagner's art is the most sensational self-portrayal and self-critique of German nature that it is possible to conceive.

Freud and the Future (1937)

 * "Freud und die Zukunft" in Imago, vol. 22 (1936); as translate by Helen T. Lowe-Porter in Essays by Thomas Mann (1957) p. 307

 * By the approach through abnormality we have succeeded in penetrating most deeply into the darkness of human nature ... The literary person should be the last person to be surprised at this fact. Sooner might he be surprised that he, considering his strong generally and individual tendency, should have so late become aware of the close sympathetic relations which connected his own existence with psychoanalytic research and the life-work of Sigmund Freud. I realized this connection only at a time when his achievement was no longer thought of as merely a therapeutic method, whether recognized or disputed; when it had long since outgrown his purely medical implications and become a world movement which penetrated into every field of science and every domain of the intellect: literature, the history of art, religion and prehistory; mythology, folklore, pedagogy, and what not.

 * Has the world ever been changed by anything save the thought and its magic vehicle the Word?

 * The myth is the foundation of life; it is the timeless schema, the pious formula into which life flows when it reproduces its traits out of the unconscious. Certainly when a writer has acquired the habit of regarding life as mythical and typical there comes a curious heightening of his artistic temper, a new refreshment to his perceiving and shaping powers, which otherwise occurs much later in life; for while in the life of the human race the mythical is an early and primitive stage, in the life of the individual it is a late and mature one.

 * I hold that we shall one day recognize in Freud's life-work the cornerstone for the building of a new anthropology and therewith of a new structure, to which many stones are being brought up today, which shall be the future dwelling of a wiser and freer humanity.

 * As a science of the unconscious it is a therapeutic method, in the grand style, a method overarching the individual case. Call this, if you choose, a poet's utopia.

The Coming Victory Of Democracy (1938)

 * Translated by Agnes E. Meyer

 * It is not easy to speak on the coming victory of democracy at a moment when the aggressive brutality of fascism seems to be so distressingly triumphant.
 * p. 9

 * I believe that the revolutionary opportunism and the glow of false dawn in these tendencies — it is obvious that I mean the fascist tendencies — are tainted magic. Not only in this respect, but particularly in this respect, fascism is so thoroughly false that honorable youth throughout the world should be ashamed to have anything to do with it.
 * p. 12

 * Fascism is a child of the times — a very offensive child — and draws whatever youth it possesses out of the times. But democracy is timelessly human, and timelessness always implies a certain amount of potential youthfulness, which need only be realized in thought and feeling in order to excel, by far, all merely transitory youthfulness in charms of every sort, in the charm of life and in the charm of beauty.
 * p. 16

 * It is in physical and mental oppression that fascism believes; this is what it practices, loves, honors, and glorifies. Oppression is not the ultimate goal but the first principle of fascism, and we know only too well that force as a principle is just as eternally human as its opposite, the idea of justice.
 * p. 17

 * The word “justice” is only one name for the idea — only one; there are other names which can be substituted that are equally strong, by no means lacking in vitality; on the contrary, even rather terrifying — for example, freedom and truth. It is impossible to decide which one should take precedence, which is the greatest. For each one expresses the idea in its totality, and one stands for the others. If we say truth, we also say freedom and justice-, if we speak of freedom and justice, we mean truth. It is a complex of an indivisible kind, freighted with spirituality and elementary dynamic force. We call it the absolute. To man has been given the absolute — be it a curse or a blessing, it is a fact. He is pledged to it, his inner being is conditioned by it, and in the human sphere a force which is opposed to truth, hostile to freedom, and lacking in justice, acts in so low and contemptible a manner because it is devoid of feeling and understanding for the relationship between man and the absolute and without comprehension of the inviolable human dignity which grows out of this relationship.
 * p. 18/19

 * To become conscious means to acquire conscience, means the knowledge of what is good and what is evil. Nature that is infra-human does not know this difference. It is without guilt. In humanity nature becomes responsible. Man is nature’s fall from grace, only it is not a fall, but just as positively an elevation as conscience is higher than innocence. What Christianity calls “ original sin ” is more than priestly trickery designed to suppress and control humanity — it is the deep feeling of man as a spiritual being for his natural infirmities and limitations, above which he raises himself through spirit. Is that infidelity to nature? By no means. It is according to nature’s deepest intent. Because it is for its own spiritualization that nature produced mankind.
 * p. 27

 * The anti-human, dictatorial mentality of our day ignores “ original sin,” or what may be called spiritual conscience. It considers the consciousness of sin, or spirituality, as injurious to military prowess. It teaches optimistic heroics — in direct and stupid contradiction of the extreme contempt for humanity, which it exalts in the same breath.
 * p. 28

 * For all men of violence, tyrants, those who seek to stupefy and stultify the masses, and all those who are intent upon turning a nation into an unthinking war-machine in order to control free and thinking citizens — these necessarily despise humanity.
 * p. 28

 * Plato’s insistence that philosophers should rule the state would create a dangerous Utopia if it merely impled that the ruler should be a philosopher. The philosopher must also be a ruler — for that, primarily, creates the relationship of mind and life which we call democratic.
 * p. 37

 * I have perhaps an insufficient awareness of the menace emanating from Russia toward the capitalistic social order; for I am no capitalist. But at least I can see that Russia does not imperil the essential upon which all else depends — namely, peace. It is not Russia that forces Europe, twenty years after the World War, to withdraw enormous resources from peaceful purposes and apply them to armaments; it is fascism and its so-called dynamics. If the world cannot achieve peace and progress, it is the fault of fascism and not of socialism.
 * p. 54

 * Such a meeting of German demands will again be in order after Hitler’s fall. But for the present any yielding to Nazi threats means a cruel and discouraging blow to those forces among the German people that are sincerely working toward freedom and peace; and since German demands that issue from National-Socialism are never aimed at peace, but exclusively at an increase of power and the improvement of its military position, their fulfilment does not serve peace but war.
 * p. 67

 * It is probable that fascism will continue to prefer this kind of war to actual open warfare as long as possible, for a real war would soon reveal the important role which lies and deception play in the “totalitarian state.”
 * p. 67-68

The Beloved Returns (1939)

 * Lotte in Weimar as translated by Helen T. Lowe-Porter, Knopf (1940); also titled as 'Lotte in Weimar: The Beloved Returns

 * Hold fast the time! Guard it, watch over it, every hour, every minute! Unregarded it slips away, like a lizard, smooth, slippery, faithless, a pixy wife. Hold every moment sacred. Give each clarity and meaning, each the weight of thine awareness, each its true and due fulfillment.
 * Ch. 7

 * Cruelty is one of the chief ingredients of love, and divided about equally between the sexes: cruelty of lust, ingratitude, callousness, maltreatment, domination. The same is true of the passive qualities, patience under suffering, even pleasure in ill usage.
 * Ch. 7

 * Profundity must smile.
 * Ch. 7

Doctor Faustus (1947)

 * This music of yours. A manifestation of the highest energy — not at all abstract, but without an object, energy in a void, in pure ether — where else in the universe does such a thing appear? We Germans have taken over from philosophy the expression ‘in itself,’ we use it every day without much idea of the metaphysical. But here you have it, such music is energy itself, yet not as idea, rather in its actuality. I call your attention to the fact that is almost the definition of God. Imitatio Dei — I am surprised it is not forbidden.
 * Ch. 9

 * Why does almost everything seem to me like its own parody? Why must I think that almost all, no, all the methods and conventions of art today are good for parody only?
 * Ch. 15

Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man (1954)

 * What a glorious gift is imagination, and what satisfaction it affords!
 * Bk. 1, Ch. 2

 * Only he who desires is amiable and not he who is satiated.
 * Bk. 1, Ch. 8

 * The intellect longs for the delights of the non-intellect, that which is alive and beautiful dans sa stupidité.
 * Madame Houpflé, Bk. 2, Ch. 9

 * 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!
 * Bk. 2, Ch. 4

 * O scenes of the beautiful world! Never have you presented yourself to more appreciative eyes.
 * Bk. 2, Ch. 4

Quotes about Mann

 * Mann has the high and now seldom encountered liberal virtue of elevating any discussion to another plane — of writing as if men were reasoning creatures, even if the evidence points to the contrary. Calmly and logically he showed that the novel is today "the representative and dominating literary work of art" — that the Jewish influence is not preponderant among the exiled novelists — that the international or European spirit, shared equally by Jewish and gentile writers, has helped to raise Germany from barbarism. And he added that the anti-Semitic campaign of the present German rulers "is aimed, essentially, not at the Jews at all, or not at them exclusively. It is aimed at Europe and at the real spirit of Germany."
 * Anonymous editorial "Homage to Thomas Mann" in The New Republic (1 April 1936)

 * I can never get over the fact that Thomas Mann would read the day’s pages, gather the family round at night and read to them what he had written during the day.
 * Nadine Gordimer Interview (2004)

title: Thomas Mann


text:
Anne Frank

Annelies Marie Frank (12 June 1929 – February/March 1945) was a young German-born Jewish diarist and aspiring writer, who died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

(1942 - 1944)

 * Composed from her 13th birthday on 12 June 1942, until 1 August 1944, just prior to her family's capture.

 * Het is voor iemand als ik een heel eigenaardige gewaarwording om in een dagboek te schrijven. Niet alleen dat ik nog nooit geschreven heb, maar het komt me zo voor, dat later noch ik, noch iemand anders in de ontboezemingen van een dertienjarig schoolmeisje belang zal stellen.
 * For someone like me, it is a very strange habit to write in a diary. Not only that I have never written before, but it strikes me that later neither I, nor anyone else, will care for the musings of a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl.
 * 20 June 1942

 * In de derde les werd het hem echter weer te bont. "Anne, als strafwerk voor praten, een opstel over het onderwerp 'Kwek, kwek, kwek, zei juffrouw Snaterbek'."
 * However, during the third class he'd finally had enough. "Anne Frank, as punishment for talking in class, write an essay entitled, Quack, Quack, Quack, Said Mistress Chatterback."
 * Writing a story about a teacher who is scolding her for being talkative in class. Variant translations: Quack, Quack, Quack, Said Miss Quackenbush. / Quack, Quack, Quack, Said Miss Natterbeak.
 * 21 June 1942

 * Maar één ding weet ik nu en dat is dit: je leert de mensen pas goed kennen, als je een keer echte ruzie met ze gemaakt hebt. Pas dan kan je hun karakter beoordelen!
 * I've learned one thing: you only really get to know a person after a fight. Only then can you judge their true character!
 * Variant translation: The only way to truly know a person is to argue with them. For when they argue in full swing, then they reveal their true character.
 * 28 September 1942

 * Fraai volk, de Duitsers. En daar behoorde ik ook eens toe!
 * Fine specimens of humanity, those Germans, and to think that I am actually one of them!
 * 9 October 1942

 * Als ik een boek lees, dat indruk op me maakt, moet ik in mezelf grondig orde scheppen, alvorens me onder de mensen te begeven, anders zou men van mij denken dat ik een wat rare geest had.
 * If I read a book that impresses me, I have to take myself firmly by the hand, before I mix with other people; otherwise they would think my mind rather queer.
 * 8 November 1943

 * Een mens kan eenzaam zijn ondanks de liefde van velen, want voor niemand is hij toch "de liefste".
 * You can be lonely even when you're loved by many people, since you're still not anybody's "one and only".
 * 29 December 1943

 * Ik sus mijn geweten nu maar met de gedachte, dat scheldwoorden beter op papier kunnen staan dan dat moeder ze moet meedragen in haar hart.
 * I soothe my conscience now with the thought that it is better for hard words to be on paper than that Mummy should carry them in her heart.
 * 2 January 1944

 * Wie zou weten, hoeveel er in een bakvisziel omgaat?
 * Who would ever think that so much went on in the soul of a young girl?
 * 12 January 1944

 * Ik laat het er op aankomen en doe niets anders dan leren en op een goed einde hopen.
 * I trust to luck and do nothing but work, hoping that all will end well.
 * 3 February 1944

 * Voor ieder die bang, eenzaam of ongelukkig is, is stellig het beste middel naar buiten te gaan, ergens waar hij helemaal alleen is, alleen met de hemel, de natuur en God. Want dan pas, dan alleen voelt men, dat alles is, zoals het zijn moet en dat God de mensen in de eenvoudige, maar mooie natuur gelukkig wil zien. Zolang dit bestaat en dat zal wel altijd zo zijn, weet ik, dat er in welke omstandigheden ook, een troost voor elk verdriet is. En ik geloof stellig, dat bij elke ellende de natuur veel ergs kan wegnemen.
 * The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quiet, alone with the heavens, nature and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be and that God wishes to see people happy, amidst the simple beauty of nature. As long as this exists, and it certainly always will, I know that then there will always be comfort for every sorrow, whatever the circumstances may be. And I firmly believe that nature brings solace in all troubles.
 * 23 February 1944

 * Men kan zeggen, je moet je mond houden, maar geen oordeel hebben bestaat niet. Niemand kan een ander zijn oordeel verbieden, al is die ander nog zo jong.
 * People can tell you to keep your mouth shut, but it doesn't stop you having your own opinions. Even if people are still very young, they shouldn't be prevented from saying what they think.
 * 2 March 1944

 * Dan denk ik niet aan al de ellende, maar aan het mooie dat nog overblijft. Hierin ligt voor een groot deel het verschil tussen moeder en mij. Haar raad voor zwaarmoedigheid is: "Denk aan al de ellende in de wereld en wees blij, dat jij die niet beleeft!" Mijn raad is: "Ga naar buiten, naar de velden, de natuur en de zon, ga naar buiten en probeer het geluk in jezelf te hervinden en in God. Denk aan al het mooie dat er in en om jezelf nog overblijft en wees gelukkig!"
 * At such moments I don't think about all the misery, but about the beauty that still remains. This is where Mother and I differ greatly. Her advice in the face of melancholy is: "Think about all the suffering in the world and be thankful you're not part of it." My advice is: "Go outside, to the country, enjoy the sun and all nature has to offer. Go outside and try to recapture the happiness within yourself; think of all the beauty in yourself and in everything around you and be happy."
 * 7 March 1944
 * Variant translations:
 * Think of all the beauty still left around you and be happy. Think of all the beauty that is still left in and around you and be happy!

 * Onder "eet-periodes" versta ik periodes waarin men niets anders te eten krijgt dan een bepaald gerecht of een bepaalde groente. Een tijdlang hadden we niets anders te eten dan elke dag andijvie met zand, zonder zand, stamppot, los en in de vuurvaste schotel, toen was het spinazie, daarna volgden koolrabie, schorseneren, komkommers, tomaten, zuurkool enzovoort enzovoort.
 * A "food cycle" is a period in which we have only one particular dish or type of vegetable to eat. For a long time we ate nothing but endive. Endive with sand -, endive without sand, endive with mashed potatoes, endive-and-mashed potato casserole. Then it was spinach, followed by kohlrabi, salsify, cucumbers, tomatoes, sauerkraut, etc., etc.
 * 3 April 1944

 * Ik moet iets hebben naast man en kinderen waar ik me aan wijden kan! O ja, ik wil niet zoals de meeste mensen voor niets geleefd hebben. Ik wil van nut of plezier zijn voor de mensen, die om mij heen leven en die mij toch niet kennen.
 * I need to have something besides a husband and children to devote myself to! I don't want to have lived in vain like most people. I want to be useful or bring enjoyment to all people, even those I've never met.
 * 5 April 1944

 * Ik wil nog voortleven ook na mijn dood! En daarom ben ik God zo dankbaar, dat hij me bij mijn geboorte al een mogelijkheid heeft meegegeven om me te ontwikkelen en om te schrijven, dus om uit te drukken alles wat in me is.
 * I want to go on living even after my death! And that's why I'm so grateful to God for having given me this gift, which I can use to develop myself and to express all that's inside me!
 * 5 April 1944

 * Wees moedig! Laten we ons van onze taak bewust blijven en niet mopperen, er zal een uitkomst komen, God heeft ons volk nooit in de steek gelaten. Door alle eeuwen heen zijn er Joden blijven leven, door alle eeuwen heen moesten Joden lijden, maar door alle eeuwen heen zijn ze ook sterk geworden; de zwakken vallen, maar de sterken zullen overblijven en nooit ondergaan!
 * Be brave! Let's remember our duty and perform it without complaint. There will be a way out. God has never deserted our people. Through the ages Jews have had to suffer, but through the ages they've gone on living, and the centuries of suffering have only made them stronger. The weak shall fall and the strong shall survive and not be defeated!
 * 11 April 1944

 * Ik geloof nooit dat de oorlog de schuld is alleen van de grote mannen, van de regeerders en kapitalisten. O neen, de kleine man doet het net zo goed graag, anders zouden de volkeren er toch al lang tegen in opstand zijn gekomen! Er is nu eenmaal in de mensen een drang tot vernieling, een drang tot doodslaan, tot vermoorden en razen en zolang de gehele mensheid, zonder uitzondering, geen grote metamorphose heeft ondergaan, zal de oorlog woeden, zal alles wat opgebouwd, aangekweekt en gegroeid is, weer geschonden en vernietigd worden, waarna de mensheid opnieuw moet beginnen.
 * I don't believe that the big men, the politicians and the capitalists alone are guilty of the war. Oh, no, the little man is just as keen, otherwise the people of the world would have risen in revolt long ago! There is an urge and rage in people to destroy, to kill, to murder, and until all mankind, without exception, undergoes a great change, wars will be waged, everything that has been built up, cultivated and grown, will be destroyed and disfigured, after which mankind will have to begin all over again.
 * 3 May 1944

 * Ik ben vaak neerslachtig geweest, maar nooit wanhopig, ik beschouw dit onderduiken als een gevaarlijk avontuur, dat romantisch en interessant is. Ik beschouw elke ontbering als een amusement in mijn dagboek. Ik heb me nu eenmaal voorgenomen, dat ik een ander leven zal leiden dan andere meisjes en later een ander leven dan gewone huisvrouwen. Dit is het goede begin van het interessante en daarom, daarom alleen moet ik in de meest gevaarlijke ogenblikken lachen om het humoristische van de situatie.
 * I have often been downcast, but never in despair; I regard our hiding as a dangerous adventure, romantic and interesting at the same time. In my diary I treat all the privations as amusing. I have made up my mind now to lead a different life from other girls and, later on, different from ordinary housewives. My start has been so very full of interest, and that is the sole reason why I have to laugh at the humorous side of the most dangerous moments.
 * 3 May 1944

 * [Ik vind], dat er nog altijd iets moois overblijft, aan de natuur, de zonneschijn, de vrijheid, aan jezelf, daar heb je wat aan. Kijk daarnaar, dan vind je jezelf weer en God, dan word je evenwichtig. En wie gelukkig is, zal ook anderen gelukkig maken, wie moed en vertrouwen heeft, zal nooit in de ellende ondergaan!
 * I've found that there is always some beauty left — in nature, sunshine, freedom, in yourself; these can all help you. Look at these things, then you find yourself again, and God, and then you regain your balance. A person who's happy will make others happy; a person who has courage and faith will never die in misery!
 * 7 May 1944

 * En begint er nog tijdens dat gevecht al tweedracht te komen, is toch de Jood weer minder dan de ander? O het is treurig, heel erg treurig, dat weer voor de zoveelste maal de oude wijsheid bevestigd is: "Wat één Christen doet, moet hijzelf verantwoorden, wat één Jood doet, valt op alle Joden terug."
 * Is discord going to show itself while we are still fighting, is the Jew once again worth less than another? Oh, it is sad, very sad, that once more, for the umpteenth time, the old truth is confirmed: "What one Christian does is his own responsibility, what one Jew does is thrown back at all Jews."
 * 22 May 1944

 * Ik geloof dat het inzicht, dat het de plicht van de vrouw is dat zij kinderen krijgt, zich in de loop van de volgende eeuw wel zal veranderen en plaats zal maken voor waardering en bewondering voor haar, die zonder mopperen en grote woorden de lasten op haar schouders neemt!
 * I believe that in the course of the next century the notion that it's a woman's duty to have children will change and make way for the respect and admiration of all women, who bear their burdens without complaint or a lot of pompous words!
 * 13 June 1944

 * Luiheid mag aantrekkelijk schijnen, werken geeft bevrediging.
 * Laziness may look inviting, but only work gives you true satisfaction.
 * Variant translation: Laziness may appear attractive but work gives satisfaction.
 * 6 July 1944

 * Wij leven allen, maar weten niet waarom en waarvoor, wij leven allen met het doel gelukkig te worden, we leven allen verschillend en toch gelijk.
 * We're all alive, but we don't know why or what for; we're all searching for happiness; we're all leading lives that are different and yet the same.
 * 6 July 1944
 * Variant translation: We all live with the objective of being happy, our lives are all different and yet the same.

 * Dat is het moeilijke in deze tijd: idealen, dromen, mooie verwachtingen komen nog niet bij ons op of ze worden door de gruwelijke werkelijkheid getroffen en zo totaal verwoest. Het is een groot wonder, dat ik niet al mijn verwachtingen heb opgegeven, want ze lijken absurd en onuitvoerbaar. Toch houd ik ze vast, ondanks alles, omdat ik nog steeds aan de innerlijke goedheid van den mens geloof. Het is me ten enenmale onmogelijk alles op te bouwen op de basis van dood, ellende en verwarring. Ik zie hoe de wereld langzaam steeds meer in een woestijn herschapen wordt, ik hoor steeds harder de aanrollende donder, die ook ons zal doden, ik voel het leed van millioenen mensen mee en toch, als ik naar de hemel kijk, denk ik, dat alles zich weer ten goede zal wenden, dat ook deze hardheid zal ophouden, dat er weer rust en vrede in de wereldorde zal komen. Intussen moet ik mijn denkbeelden hoog en droog houden, in de tijden die komen zijn ze misschien toch nog uit te voeren.
 * It's difficult in times like these: ideals, dreams and cherished hopes rise within us, only to be crushed by grim reality. It's a wonder I haven't abandoned all my ideals, they seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart. It's utterly impossible for me to build my life on a foundation of chaos, suffering and death. I see the world being slowly transformed into a wilderness, I hear the approaching thunder that, one day, will destroy us too, I feel the suffering of millions. And yet, when I look up at the sky, I somehow feel that everything will change for the better, that this cruelty too shall end, that peace and tranquility will return once more. In the meantime, I must hold on to my ideals. Perhaps the day will come when I'll be able to realize them!
 * 15 July 1944; Variant translations:
 * It's really a wonder that I haven't dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.
 * I keep my ideals, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.
 * I simply can't build my hopes on a foundation of confusion, misery, and death...and yet...I think...this cruelty will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.

 * Ouders kunnen alleen raad of goede aanwijzingen meegeven, de uiteindelijke vorming van iemands karakter ligt in zijn eigen hand.
 * Parents can only give good advice or put them on the right paths, but the final forming of a person's character lies in their own hands.
 * 15 July 1944

 * Vergeef me, ik heb niet voor niets de naam een bundeltje tegenspraak te zijn!
 * Forgive me, Kitty, they don't call me a bundle of contradictions for nothing!
 * 21 July 1944

Tales from the Secret Annex

 * We all know that a good example is more effective than advice. So set a good example, and it won't take long for others to follow.
 * "Give!" (26 March 1944)
 * Variant translation: People will always follow a good example; be the one to set a good example, then it won't be long before the others follow.

 * How wonderful it is that no one has to wait, but can start right now to gradually change the world! How wonderful it is that everyone, great and small, can immediately help bring about justice by giving of themselves! [...] You can always — always — give something, even if it's a simple act of kindness!
 * "Give!" (26 March 1944)
 * Variant translation: How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before beginning to improve the world! [...] You can always, always give something, even if it is only kindness!

Disputed

 * Everyone has inside of him a piece of good news. The good news is that you don't know how great you can be! How much you can love! What you can accomplish! And what your potential is!
 * As quoted in Networking the Kingdom: A Practical Strategy for Maximum Church Growth (1990) by O. J. Bryson, p. 187; this is the earliest source yet found for this attribution.

 * Look at how a single candle can both defy and define the darkness.
 * As quoted in 7 Laws of Human Nature: The Oneness of Universal Love (2017) by Conrad Spainhower and other self-help books and quotation sites.

 * No one has ever become poor by giving.
 * Attributed to Anne Frank in various self-help books but always without citation.

Quotes about Frank

 * Alphabetized by author

 * Anne Frank is each of us, and beyond what each of us is and will be. Her diary does not contain photographs of trains pulling into the last smoke-filled station. She dared to speak of springtime's light, and the body of a girl becoming a woman. I like Anne Frank because she was no more nor less than ourselves, a schoolgirl. She spoke of awakening to excitement, of the rain in Europe. Even so, there was something more in Anne, beyond that first innocence, as if she were submerged in transparencies.
 * Marjorie Agosín The Alphabet in My Hands: A Writing Life (2000) translated from the Spanish by Nancy Abraham Hall, Chapter Seven

 * (Have you related to any other stories of children or adolescents, of young people growing up?) There was The Catcher in the Rye, the Diary of Ann Frank... Yes, actually I have, definitely.
 * Tsitsi Dangarembga in Talking with African Writers by Jane Wilkinson

 * Anne Frank's legacy is still very much alive and it can address us fully, especially at a time when the map of the world is changing and when dark passions are awakening within people.
 * Vaclav Havel, as quoted in "Anne's words still strengthen spirits" by Joyce Apsel in The St. Petersburg Times (26 January 2000)

 * Here's how much people love dead Jews: Anne Frank's diary, first published in Dutch in 1947 via her surviving father, Otto Frank, has been translated into seventy languages and has sold more than 30 million copies worldwide, and the Anne Frank House now hosts well over a million visitors each year
 * Dara Horn "Everyones (Second) Favorite Dead Jew" in People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present (2021)

 * Of the multitude who throughout history have spoken for human dignity in times of great suffering and loss, no voice is more compelling than that of Anne Frank.
 * John F. Kennedy, as quoted in "Anne's words still strengthen spirits" by Joyce Apsel in The St. Petersburg Times (26 January 2000)

 * One single Anne Frank moves us more than the countless others who suffered just as she did, but whose faces have remained in the shadows. Perhaps it is better that way: If we were capable of taking in the suffering of all those people, we would not be able to live.
 * Primo Levi, as quoted in "Anne's words still strengthen spirits" by Joyce Apsel in The St. Petersburg Times (26 January 2000)

 * Some of us read Anne Frank's diary on Robben Island and derived much encouragement of it.
 * Nelson Mandela, as quoted in "Anne's words still strengthen spirits" by Joyce Apsel in The St. Petersburg Times (26 January 2000)

Article on The Diary of a Young Girl (2013)

 * “Anne Frank's diary isn't pornographic – it just reveals an uncomfortable truth”, by Emer O'Toole, The Guardian (2 May 2013)

 * Gail Horalek, the mother of a 7th-grade child in Michigan in the US, has made international headlines by complaining that the unabridged version of Anne Frank's diary is pornographic and should not be taught at her daughter's school. At issue for Horalek is a section detailing Anne's exploration of her own genitalia, material originally omitted by Anne's father, Otto Frank, when he prepared the manuscript for publication in the late 40s I had to look up what age kids are in the 7th grade. They're 12 to 13! They're only about a year younger than Anne was when she wrote of her vagina: "There are little folds of skin all over the place, you can hardly find it. The little hole underneath is so terribly small that I simply can't imagine how a man can get in there, let alone how a whole baby can get out!" There cannot be a 13-year-old girl on the planet who hasn't had a root around and arrived at this exact stage of bafflement.

 * Horalek is, of course, wrong to call the passages pornographic. Pornography is material intended to arouse sexual excitement, and I very much doubt that was Anne's intention when she wrote to her imaginary confidant Kitty about her journeys of self-discovery.

 * Anne is going through puberty, and she describes her changed vagina in honest detail, saying, "until I was 11 or 12, I didn't realise there was a second set of labia on the inside, since you couldn't see them. What's even funnier is that I thought urine came out of the clitoris." (Oh Anne, we've all been there.) She continues: "In the upper part, between the outer labia, there's a fold of skin that, on second thought, looks like a kind of blister. That's the clitoris." It's beautiful, visceral writing, and it's describing something that most young women experience. And yet I can understand that the junior Ms Horalek would have squirmed and wished herself elsewhere when this was read in class. We live in a society in which young women are taught to be ashamed of the changes that their bodies undergo at puberty – to be secretive about them, and even to pretend that they don't exist. Breasts, the minute they bud, are strapped into harnesses, and the nipples disguised from view. Period paraphernalia must be discreet, with advertisers routinely boasting that their tampons look enough like sweets to circumvent the social horror of discovery. For my generation, removal of post-pubescent hair on the legs and underarms was mandatory. For Ms Horalek's generation, it is mandatory for pubic hair too. Anne writes: "When you're standing up, all you see from the front is hair. Between your legs there are two soft, cushiony things, also covered with hair, which press together when you're standing, so you can't see what's inside." How must reading this feel for pubescent girls who've already internalised the message that they must spend the rest of their lives maintaining the illusion that their body hair doesn't exist.

 * Dealing with this discomfort only involves censoring Anne Frank's diary if you're quite, quite odd. For the rest of us, the answer might be a little more free-flowing boob, some brazen Mooncup sterilisation, hairy legs sprinting through the summer grasses and, to use a pun that is intended as the highest compliment, Frankness about masturbation, sexuality and our bodies. Because it isn't just the Horaleks of this world who teach girls to be shameful rather than celebratory.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Anne Frank


text:
User:Seth Ilys~enwikiquote

See my Wikipedia user page.

title: User:Seth Ilys~enwikiquote


text:
Fact

A fact (derived from the Latin factum) is something that has really occurred or is actually the case. The usual test for a statement of fact is verifiability, that is whether it can be proven to correspond to experience.

Quotes

 * Quotes are arranged first by century, and in every century alphabetically by author

18th century

 * Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence...
 * John Adams, Boston Massacre trial (1770). Adams defended the British soldiers who were charged with committing murder at the Boston Massacre

 * Matters of fact, which as Mr Budgell somewhere observes, are very stubborn things.
 * Matthew Tindal (1733) The Will of Matthew Tindal

 * But facts are chiels that winna ding, and downa be disputed.
 * Robert Burns, A Dream (1786)

19th century

 * If any theories or opinions of mine can be damaged by facts, so much the worse for my theories.
 * James A. Garfield, Commissioner Wells's Report. Remarks made in the House of Representatives, January 1869. Quoted in

 * What could I do! Facts are such horrid things!
 * Jane Austen (1871) Lady Susan, Letter XXXII
 * Published posthumously, probably written circa 1794.

 * "I should have more faith," he said; "I ought to know by this time that when a fact appears opposed to a long train of deductions it invariably proves to be capable of bearing some other interpretation."
 * Arthur Conan Doyle (1887) A Study in Scarlet

 * It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.
 * Arthur Conan Doyle (1891) A Scandal in Bohemia
 * See also:
 * It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence. It biases the judgment.
 * Arthur Conan Doyle( 1887), A Study in Scarlet, Part 1, chap. 3

 * After all, facts are facts, and although we may quote one to another with a chuckle the words of the Wise Statesman, "Lies — damned lies — and statistics," still there are some easy figures the simplest must understand, and the astutest cannot wriggle out of. So we may be led to the serious consideration of change by the evolution of materials of conviction which those who run may read, though some who read may wish to run away from them.
 * Leonard H. Courtney,o "My Fellow-Disciples at Saratoga Springs," in The National Review, London, 1895

 * [I]t is quite certain that only through the equal presence to successive feeling of a subject other than they, which holds them together, and thus held together regards them as its object, are there related things or relations at all. It is not that first there are relations then they are conceived. Every relation is constituted by an act of conception. This is not to be understood as meaning that there is 'nothing but the soul and its feelings,' or that realities are feelings, even feelings as determined by thought. It is through feeling as determined by thought that for us there comes to be reality, but the reality is not to be identified with the process by which we, as thinking animals, arrive at it. Even simple facts of feeling (e.g. the fact that a certain sweet smell accompanies the sight of a rose) are not feelings as felt: more clearly, the conditions of such facts are not feelings, even as determined by thought. A 'feeling determined by thought' would probably mean a feeling which but for thought I should not have, e.g. emotion at the spectacle of a tragedy. Objective facts are not of this sort, not feelings determined by thought, though but for the determination of feeling by thought they would not exist for our consciousness.
 * T. H. Green, Works, Volumen 2, 1886, Longmans, Green & Co.

 * Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.
 * Thomas Henry Huxley, letter to Charles Kingsley (September 23, 1860); reported in Leonard Huxley, Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley (1900, reprinted 1979), vol. 1, p. 235.

 * The fatal futility of Fact.
 * Henry James (1897) Prefaces

 * Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.
 * William James, in "Is Life Worth Living?" The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897)

 * Talk to him of Jacob's ladder, and he would ask him the number of steps.
 * Douglas William Jerrold (1895) Wit and Opinion of Douglas Jerrold

 * The fact disclosed by a survey of the past that majorities have usually been wrong, must not blind us to the complementary fact that majorities have usually not been entirely wrong.
 * Herbert Spencer, First Principles (1862): Pt. I, The Unknowable; Ch. I, Religion and Science.

20th century

 * Fiction is fact distilled into truth.
 * Edward Albee, The New York Times (18 September 1966).

 * I often wish … that I could rid the world of the tyranny of facts. What are facts but compromises? A fact merely marks the point where we have agreed to let investigation cease.
 * Author unknown, "On Having Known a Poet", The Atlantic Monthly (May 1906), p. 712; attributed to frequent contributor Bliss Carman in Bruce Bohle, ed., The Home Book of American Quotations (1967), p. 90.

 * Facts were never pleasing to him. He acquired them with reluctance and got rid of them with relief. He was never on terms with them until he had stood them on their heads.
 * J.M. Barrie, The Greenwood Hat (1937)

 * Never assume that any fact is useless until it is so proven.
 * James Blish, Midsummer Century (1972), Chapter 9. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (April 1972).

 * We sometimes speak of stubborn facts. Nonsense! A fact is a mere babe when compared with a stubborn theory.
 * Samuel McChord Crothers, The Gentle Reader (1903) p. 277

 * There is no one fact in the physical world which has a greater impact on the way things are, than the Pauli exclusion principle.
 * Ian Duck and E. C. G. Sudarshan:

 * The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts, but the training of the mind to think.
 * Albert Einstein (1921) cited in: Philipp Frank (1947) Einstein: His Life and Times, p. 185

 * I think that only daring speculation can lead us further and not accumulation of facts.
 * Albert Einstein in letter to Michele Besso (8 October 1952)

 * I despaired of the possibility of discovering the true laws by means of constructive efforts based on known facts. The longer and the more despairingly I tried, the more I came to the conviction that only the discovery of a universal formal principle could lead us to assured results.
 * Albert Einstein (1949) Autobiographical Notes.

 * Facts are constituted by older ideologies, and a clash between facts and theories may be proof of progress.
 * Paul Karl Feyerabend (1975) Against Method. p. 33

 * Not only are facts and theories in constant disharmony, they are never as neatly separated as everyone makes them out to be.
 * Paul Karl Feyerabend (1975) Against Method. p. 66

 * Scientific "facts" are taught at a very early age and in the very same manner in which religious "facts" were taught only a century ago. There is no attempt to waken the critical abilities of the pupil so that he may be able to see things in perspective. At the universities the situation is even worse, for indoctrination is here carried out in a much more systematic manner. Criticism is not entirely absent. Society, for example, and its institutions, are criticised most severely and often most unfairly... But science is excepted from the criticism. In society at large the judgment of the scientist is received with the same reverence as the judgement of bishops and cardinals was accepted not too long ago. The move towards "demythologization," for example, is largely motivated by the wish to avoid any clash between Christianity and scientific ideas. If such a clash occurs, then science is certainly right and Christianity wrong. Pursue this investigation further and you will see that science has now become as oppressive as the ideologies it had once to fight. Do not be misled by the fact that today hardly anyone gets killed for joining a scientific heresy. This has nothing to do with science. It has something to do with the general quality of our civilization. Heretics in science are still made to suffer from the most severe sanctions this relatively tolerant civilization has to offer.
 * Paul Karl Feyerabend (1975) How To Defend Society Against Science

 * Results from a given approach are "facts" as long as the approach fits the group or the tradition that is being addressed
 * Paul Karl Feyerabend (1999) Conquest of Abundance. pg 86

 * Knowledge is a collection of facts. Wisdom is the use of knowledge. Without facts there is no knowledge. Without knowledge there is no wisdom. Facts prevent what nothing can cure. Facts are Man's best defense mechanism. Without them men fumble, falter and fail. Without them nations decline and fall. Wisdom wins wars before they start. Knowledge aborts national hostilities. Wisdom obviates racial antipathies. Knowledge effaces religious animosities. Emancipation from bigotry prefaces peace. Intolerance takes all and gives nothing. Peace rewards reciprocal respect and regard. To all Men of Good Will, "Pax Vobiscum!"
 * Benjamin H. Freedman, "Facts are Facts : A letter to David Goldstein, 10 October 1954

 * Facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts do not go away while scientists debate rival theories for explaining them.
 * Stephen Jay Gould "Evolution as Fact and Theory", pp. 254–55, originally appeared in Discover Magazine, May 1981.

 * The facts of nature are what they are, but we can only view them through the spectacles of our mind.
 * Stephen Jay Gould (1986) "Glow, Big Glowworm", in: Natural History 95 (12): 10-16.

 * The power of administrative bodies to make finding of fact which may be treated as conclusive, if there is evidence both ways, is a power of enormous consequence. An unscrupulous administrator might be tempted to say "Let me find the facts for the people of my country, and I care little who lays down the general principles."
 * Charles Evans Hughes, "Important Work of Uncle Sam's Lawyers", American Bar Association Journal (April 1931), p. 238, reprinting an address to the Federal Bar Association, Washington, D.C. (February 11, 1931), where the chief justice spoke of the "extraordinary development of administrative agencies of the government and of the lawyer's part in making them work satisfactorily and also in protecting the public against bureaucratic excesses", according to the article's subtitle.

 * Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
 * Aldous Huxley (1927) Proper Studies

 * Where theory lags behind the facts, we are dealing with miserable degenerating research programmes."
 * Imre Lakatos (1978, p. 6), cited in: Vernon L. Smith, "Theory, experiment and economics]." The Journal of Economic Perspectives (1989):p. 168

 * The subversive character of truth inflicts upon thought an imperative quality. Logic centers on judgments which are, as demonstrative propositions, imperatives, — the predicative “is” implies an “ought.” … Verification of the proposition involves a process in fact as well as in thought: (S) must become that which it is. The categorical statement thus turns into a categorical imperative; it does not state a fact but the necessity to bring about a fact. For example, it could be read as follows: man is not (in fact) free, endowed with inalienable rights, etc., but he ought to be.
 * Herbert Marcuse (1964) One-Dimensional Man, pp. 132-133

 * Upon this gifted age, in its dark hour, Rains from the sky a meteoric shower Of facts . . . they lie unquestioned, uncombined. Wisdom enough to leech us of our ill...
 * Edna St. Vincent Millay, "Upon this age, that never speaks its mind" (1938) "Huntsman, what quarry?"

 * You had to know the facts if you were ever going to find the solutions.
 * Nyasha in  (1988) by Tsitsi Dangarembga, p. 93

 * Facts have a cruel way of substituting themselves for fancies. There is nothing more remorseless, just as there is nothing more helpful, than truth.
 * William C. Redfield, secretary of commerce, address at Case School, Cleveland, Ohio (May 27, 1915); reported in Ashley H. Thorndike, Modern Eloquence (1936), vol. 7, p. 392.

 * Obviously the facts are never just coming at you but are incorporated by an imagination that is formed by your previous experience. Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts.
 * Philip Roth The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography (1988): Opening letter to Nathan Zuckerman

 * Historical facts, many of them, have an intrinsic value, a profound interest on their own account, which makes them worthy of study, quite apart from any possibility of linking them together by means of causal laws.
 * Bertrand Russell (1904) On History
 * We are driven back to correspondence with fact as constituting the nature of truth. It remains to define precisely what we mean by 'fact', and what is the nature of the correspondence which must subsist between belief and fact, in order that belief may be true.
 * Bertrand Russell (1912) The Problems of Philosophy

 * A hallucination is a fact, not an error; what is erroneous is a judgment based upon it.
 * Bertrand Russell (1914) On the Nature of Acquaintance: Neutral Monism

 * Facts have to be discovered by observation, not by reasoning
 * Bertrand Russell (1945) A History of Western Philosophy Book Three, Part I, Chapter X, Spinoza, p. 577

 * When you are studying any matter, or considering any philosophy, ask yourself only: What are the facts, and what is the truth that the facts bear out. Never let yourself be diverted, either by what you wish to believe, or what you think could have beneficent social effects if it were believed; but look only and solely at what are the facts.
 * Bertrand Russell (1959) in a BBC interview on "Face to Face"

 * A myth is, of course, not a fairy story. It is the presentation of facts belonging to one category in the idioms appropriate to another. To explode a myth is accordingly not to deny the facts but to re-allocate them.
 * Gilbert Ryle (1949) The Concept of Mind

 * Facts do not "speak for themselves." They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theory or visions are mere isolated curiosities.
 * Thomas Sowell, A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles (1987)

 * The hard facts are extraordinary, without adding superstitious mumbo-jumbo.
 * Vernor Vinge, A Deepness in the Sky (1999), ISBN 0-812-53635-5, p. 568

 * There is nothing in the real world which is merely an inert fact. Every reality is there for feeling: it promotes feeling; and it is felt.
 * Alfred North Whitehead, , 1929, Chapter IV, p. 310.

 * 1 The world is all that is the case. 1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things. 1.11 The world is determined by the facts, and by their being all the facts. 1.12 For the totality of facts determines what is the case, and also whatever is not the case. 1.13 The facts in logical space are the world. 1.2 The world divides into facts. 1.21 Each item can be the case or not the case while everything else remains the same.
 * Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921)

21st century

 * We can define a fact as an observation backed up by such a preponderance of evidence that no useful purpose would be served by doubting it.
 * Mordechai Ben-Ari, Just a Theory: Exploring the Nature of Science (2005), Chapter 3

 * People make a grievous error thinking that a list of facts is the truth. Facts are just the bare bones out of which truth is made.
 * Shelby Foote, "Shelby Foote Profile," at achievement.org, Academy of Achievement, last updated June 28, 2005

 * The educated don't get that way by memorizing facts; they get that way by respecting them.
 * Tom Heehler, "The Well-Spoken Thesaurus," (2011)

 * Facts interest me less than the trailing smoke of stories.
 * Naomi Shihab Nye Voices in the Air: Poems for Listeners (2018)

 * Every moment age is creeping up stealthily, but life, life is melting down like a candle that is flickering around.
 * Suman Pokhrel, A Birthday Greeting to Myself

 * Life is withering away like a candle that is melting down.
 * Suman Pokhrel, A Birthday Greeting to Myself

 * I have no need for the boundless sky; the moon and stars are beyond my grasp. I prefer to exist in the real world, for dreams alone cannot sustain me.
 * Sanu Sharma

 * Facts don't care about your feelings.
 * Ben Shapiro, first used on Dr. Drew On Call,

 * One assault on the world of facts was launched some time ago from the direction of the theory of knowledge. This campaign was primarily waged by those who aimed to discredit the empiricist belief that our world consists of sense data capable of being directly perceived and uncontentiously described. It would not be too much to say that by now this particular dogma of empiricism has fallen into very general disrepute. Scarcely anyone nowadays believes in the possibility of building up structures of factual knowledge on foundations purporting to be wholly independent of our judgements.
 * Quentin Skinner, "Introduction: Seeing things their way", Visions of Politics (2002)

 * Besides being assailed by epistemologists, the world of facts has been undermined in recent times by developments within the theory of meaning. The cardinal assumption of positivistic philosophies of language was that all meaningful statements must refer to facts, and thus that the meanings of sentences must be given by the method of verifying the assertions contained in them.
 * Quentin Skinner, "Introduction: Seeing things their way", Visions of Politics (2002)

title: Fact


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W. C. Fields

W. C. Fields (29 January 1880 – 25 December 1946), born William Claude Dukenfield, was an American actor, comedian and juggler.

Quotes

 * Here lies W. C. Fields. I would rather be living in Philadelphia.
 * This was an epitaph Fields proposed for himself in a 1925 article in Vanity Fair. It refers to his long standing jokes about Philadelphia (his actual birthplace), and the grave being one place he might actually not prefer to be. This is often repeated as "On the whole, I'd rather be in Philadelphia.", or "All things considered, I'd rather be in Philadelphia." which he might have stated at other times. It has also sometimes been distorted into a final dig at Philadelphia: "Better here than in Philadelphia." Fields' actual tomb at Forest Lawn in Glendale, California simply reads "W. C. Fields 1880–1946".

 * Never give a sucker an even break.
 * According to Collier's (28 November 1925), Fields is said to have used this line as early as 1923 in the musical comedy play Poppy. It became the title of one of his films in 1941 and Fields' character also spoke this line in the sound film version of Poppy (1936) and in You Can't Cheat an Honest Man (1940).

 * And it ain't a fit night out for man nor beast.
 * The Fatal Glass of Beer (1933). Fields adapts an English proverb that was popular in the 17th century. (James Howell, English Proverbs (1659): "When the wind is in the east it is good for neither man nor beast"; John Ray, English Proverbs  (1670): "When the wind's in the East, It's neither good for man nor beast." In rhyming "east" with "beast" the proverb refers to weather patterns in the British isles.)

 * She's all dressed up like a well-kept grave.
 * In reference to Jan Duggan's character in The Old Fashioned Way (1934)
 * Who knows what's funny?
 * As quoted in "One Word More: Liberalism Can Be a Bit Confusing" by Ralph McGill, in The Atlanta Constitution (14 August 1938)

 * I'd rather have two girls at twenty-one each, than one girl at forty-two.
 * Some contemptible scoundrel stole the cork from my lunch ...
 * You Can't Cheat an Honest Man (1939)

 * Whilst traveling through Afghanistan, we lost our corkscrew. Had to live on food and water for several days.
 * If a thing is worth having, it's worth cheating for.
 * My Little Chickadee (1940)

 * Was I in here last night and did I spend a twenty-dollar bill? (the bartender replies: Yes) Oh, what a load is off my mind. I thought I LOST it! it
 * The Bank Dick (1940)

 * I was in love with a beautiful blonde once, dear. She drove me to drink. That's the one thing I'm so indebted to her for. (Variant: 'Twas a woman who drove me to drink. I never had the courtesy to thank her.)
 * [To a waitress]] I didn't squawk about the steak, dear. I merely said I didn't see that old horse that used to be tethered outside here.
 * Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (1941)

 * I never voted for anybody. I always voted against.
 * As recounted by Robert Lewis Taylor in W.C. Fields: His Follies and Fortunes
 * Variant: I never vote for anyone; I always vote against.

 * Back in my rummy days, I would tremble and shake for hours upon arising. It was the only exercise I got.
 * Don't say you can't give up drinking. It's easy. I've done it a thousand times.
 * The Temperance Lecture

 * The story goes that a polite young lady journalist invited him to lunch at Chasen's in hope of a story. Lunch in his case was a liquid affair, and left him uncommunicative. Noticing the passion with which he shooed away the hovering waiter with the ice water jug, she seized an opening. "Mr. Fields, could you tell me the reason for your well-known aversion to water?" "Delighted, my dear," he replied with suddenly increased bonhomie. "Never touch the stuff—very unhealthy. Fish fuck in it."
 * Quoted in Leslie Halliwell Halliwell's Hundred (1982), p. 231.

 * It was a woman who drove me to drink—and you know, I never bothered to thank her.
 * Quoted in Newsweek (November 27, 1972), p. 52

 * No water—I never touch water. Fish make love in it.
 * Quoted in Newsweek (November 27, 1972), p. 52

Misattributed

 * Anyone who hates children and dogs can't be all bad.
 * Although very commonly attributed to Fields, this is derived from a statement that was actually first said about him by Leo Rosten  during a "roast" at the Masquer's Club in Hollywood in 1939, as Rosten explains in his book, The Power of Positive Nonsense (1977) "The only thing I can say about W. C. Fields ... is this: Any man who hates dogs and babies can't be all bad."
 * Variant: Anyone who hates babies and dogs can't be all bad.

 * If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.
 * The earliest source found in Google Books dates from 1958, and does not attribute it to W. C. Fields but to a certain "Bill": I said, "What do you do, Bill?" He says "Well, if I can't dazzle them with my brilliance I baffle them with my bull," and doggone if he doesn't. Not found attributed to W. C. Fields until 2005.

Quotes about

 * Bill Fields walked in the first day, reeking of liquor. He came over and apologized to me. Understand, I was in awe of his talents. I said, "Mr. Fields, on you it smells like eau de cologne," and he brightened up. A very sweet egomaniac.
 * , recalling a brief conversation on the set of ; as quoted in Conversations with Classic Film Stars (2016) by James Bawden and Ron Miller, p. 381
 * On the sauce, his saloon talk is wiser than My scholar's treatise. On the con, he outwits Himself, and yet portrays his downward spiral into Beefsteak mines, mansions in the Grampian Hills, Dollars falling from a sky blue as a copper chip. His mordant eye schemes afresh from every reverse. Why this sudden rapport with his profound failure To eat ice cream neatly, refill a flask unnoticed, Escape the flypaper floor of Baby Leroy's molasses? Jargon-mouthed, rum-rank-breathed, reprobate uncle. Your legacy of irrascible, bulbous disrepute is Far sweeter, I swear, than Phyllis's daffodils. W.C., I am staring you in the eye tonight. Only the gunning cars and lonely trains Punctuate our confrontation, you and I, Two confidence men on confidential terms.
 * , from "Elegy for William Claude Dunkinfield (W.C. Fields)," "Kansas City's 10-Year Poetry Explosion" by Virginia Scott Miner, The Kansas City Star Sunday Magazine (February 6, 1972), pp. 18, 21.

title: W. C. Fields