"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."

I remember in the 8th grade, I wrote a paper titled "What Is Art?", I basically wrote a whole essay on the sum of this quote. Had I knew Thomas Mann had so much to say, I would have quoted him in that essay. I define art as "anything that is a product of creativity", here, Thomas Mann defines what role language plays in art and life. He talks about how it creates within itself "... in that it creates". - Thomas Mann

Thomas Mann- (German writer and artist):

"For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts."
"A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth."

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

"Human reason needs only to will more strongly than fate, and she is fate."

"If you are possessed by an idea, you find it expressed everywhere, you even smell it."

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

"People's behavior makes sense if you think about it in terms of their goals, needs, and motives."

"Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous - to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd."



"The task of a writer consists of being able to make something out of an idea."

"The writer's joy is the thought that can become emotion, the emotion that can wholly become a thought."

"War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace."

"We don't love qualities, we love persons; sometimes by reason of their defects as well as of their qualities."