Frases de Thomas Mann página 3

“Su respeto hacia el trabajo era, pues, de naturaleza religiosa y, hasta donde él era consciente, indiscutible. Otra cuestión muy distinta era que lo amase; a eso no podía llegar, por profundo que fuese su respeto, por la sencilla razón de que no estaba hecho para trabajar. Un trabajo duro irritaba sus nervios, lo agotaba enseguida, y Hans Castorp reconocía con franqueza que, en realidad, amaba mucho más el tiempo libre, en que no tenía que soportar el plúmbeo peso del esfuerzo, tiempo a su entera disposición, no sujeto a un programa de obstáculos que había que vencer a regañadientes.”

La montaña mágica

“«Confieso un honrado menosprecio hacia la mediocridad, que no sabe de maestría y, por tanto, lleva una vida fácil y necia, y considero que es demasiada la gente que escribe». Los orígenes del Doktor Faustus”

La montaña mágica

“La muerte era de una naturaleza piadosa, significativa y tristemente bella, es decir, espiritual; pero, al mismo tiempo, también poseía una segunda naturaleza, casi contraria, muy física y material que, desde luego, no se podía considerar bella, ni significativa, ni piadosa, ni siquiera triste. La naturaleza solemne y espiritual se expresaba en la suntuosa mortaja y ataúd del difunto, las magníficas flores y las palmas que, como se sabe, significan la paz celestial (…) Todas aquellas disposiciones claramente hallaban su sentido y su buen fin en la idea de que el abuelo había adoptado su forma definitiva y verdadera para siempre. Pero además, como muy bien captó el pequeño Hans Castorp, aunque no quiso reconocerlo, todo aquello, y especialmente a su vez, la enorme cantidad de flores (y, entre éstas, en particular de nardos) tenía otro sentido y otro fin más prosaico: mitigar ese otro aspecto de la muete que no es ni bello ni realmente triste, sino más bien casi indecente, bajo, indignamente físico; hacer olvidar o impedir tomar conciencia de la muerte (pp.43-44)”

“El que nace para ser ahorcado nunca morirá ahogado.”

“De la muerte nadie que volviese de ella podría decir que vale la pena, pues no se tiene vivencia alguna de la muerte. Salimos de las tinieblas y entramos en las tinieblas. Entre esos dos instantes hay muchas experiencias, vivencias, pero no vivimos ni el principio ni el fin, ni el nacimiento ni la muerte; ninguno de los dos tiene carácter subjetivo; en tanto procesos, caen enteramente en el terreno de lo objetivo.”

Fuente: Ortega Blake, Arturo. El gran libro de las frases célebres. Editorial Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial México, 2013 ISBN 978-60-7311-631-2.

“La belleza, como el dolor, hace sufrir.”

Fuente: Citado en Zuleta, Estanislao. Thomas Mann, La montaña mágica y la llanura prosaica. 2ª Edición. Hombre Nuevo Editores, 2003. p. 309.

“La vejez es la peor de todas las corrupciones.”

Fuente: Israel, Ricardo. El libro de las verdades. Citas citables. Editorial RIL Editores, 2011. p. 12.

“El escritor es aquel al que escribir le resulta más difícil que a las demás personas.”

“Colocar en el mismo plano moral el comunismo ruso y el nazifascismo, en la medida en que ambos serían totalitarios, en el mejor de los casos es una superficialidad; en el peor, es fascismo. Quien insiste en esta equiparación puede considerarse un demócrata, pero en verdad y en el fondo de su corazón es en realidad un fascista, y desde luego solo combatirá el fascismo de manera aparente e hipócrita, mientras deja todo su odio para el comunismo.”

Fuente: Citado en Marina, José Antonio. La magia de escribir. Editorial Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial España, 2010. ISBN 9788401390456.

“La maldad, señor, es el espíritu de la crítica, y la crítica es el origen del progreso y la ilustración.”

Fuente: Citado en Becerra, David. La Guerra Civil como moda literaria. Editorial Clave Intelectual, 2016. ISBN 9788494528149. p. 1897.
Fuente: Domenico Losurdo en Stalin: historia y crítica de una leyenda negra, p. 17.

“¿Quién podría descifrar el enigma de la naturaleza del artista? ¿Quién puede comprender esa fusión instintiva de disciplina y desenfreno en que consiste? Porque el hecho de no querer un sedante saludable es desenfreno.”

La montaña mágica

“Porque quien tiene confianza en sí mismo practica lo más difícil para estar mejor preparado en lo fácil”

La muerte en venecia/Las tablas de la ley

“la palabra es enemiga de lo misterioso y cruel delatora de lo vulgar.”

Confesiones del estafador Félix Krull

“era como una estrofa de un poema primitivo que hablara de los tiempos originarios, del comienzo de la forma y del nacimiento de los dioses.”

Confesiones del estafador Félix Krull

“¿Quiere decir, malicioso? Sí, soy un poco malicioso –dijo Settembrini–. Lo que lamento es estar condenado a malgastar mi maldad en cosas tan miserables.”

La muerte en venecia/Las tablas de la ley

“La corrupción es como un pantano sin fondo: de ella se puede esperar todo.”

La montaña mágica

“Para todo amigo de la ilustración, la palabra «pueblo» y su concepto mismo conservan algo de primitivo que causa aprensión y es porque se sabe que basta tratar de pueblo a la multitud para predisponerla a actos de regresiva maldad. Ante nuestros ojos, o lejos de ellos, ¿cuántas cosas no han ocurrido en nombre del pueblo que no hubiesen podido ocurrir en nombre de dios, de la humanidad o del derecho?”

“Mire, la muerte es digna de honores en tanto es la cuna de la vida, el seno materno de la renovación. Sin embargo, vista como la antítesis de la vida y separada de ella se convierte en un fantasma, en una máscara horrenda o en algo peor todavía. Porque la muerte entendida como fuerza espiritual independiente es una fuerza enteramente depravada; cuya perversa seducción sin duda es sinónimo del más espantoso extravío del espíritu humano.”

“los años ricos en acontecimientos transcurren con mayor lentitud que los años pobres, vacíos y carentes de peso, que el viento barre y que pasan volando. Lo”

La montaña mágica

“¿Comprendes ahora por qué nosotros, los poetas, no podemos ser sabios ni dignos? ¿Comprendes por qué tenemos que extraviarnos necesariamente, y ser siempre disolutos, aventureros del sentimiento? La maestría de nuestro estilo es mentira e insensatez; nuestra gloria y honorabilidad, una farsa; la confianza de la multitud en nosotros, el colmo del ridículo.”

La montaña mágica

Thomas Mann libro La muerte en Venecia

Death in Venice

“Quien toma en serio a Nietzsche, quien lo toma al pie de la letra y le cree, está perdido.”

“Apasionado: eso significa vivir por vivir.”

Fuente: Citado en Sebreli, Juan José. El olvido de la razón. Editorial Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial Argentina, 2011. ISBN 9789500734769.

Esta traducción está esperando su revisión. ¿Es correcto?

“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?”

Thomas Mann: Frases en inglés

“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.”

Thomas Mann libro Doctor Faustus

Fuente: Doctor Faustus (1947), Ch. 15

“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 the inviolable condition of life.”

Thomas Mann libro La montaña mágica

Naphta in Ch. 7
The Magic Mountain (1924)

“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?”

Thomas Mann libro La montaña mágica

Fuente: The Magic Mountain (1924), Ch. 5

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

Suffering and Greatness of Richard Wagner (1933)

“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!”

Freud and the Future (1937)

“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.”

Thomas Mann libro La montaña mágica

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!
Fuente: The Magic Mountain (1924), Ch. 5

“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.”

Thomas Mann libro La montaña mágica

Fuente: The Magic Mountain (1924), 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.”

Nobel Banquet Speech (10 December 1929) http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1929/mann-speech.html

“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.”

Thomas Mann libro La montaña mágica

Fuente: The Magic Mountain (1924), Ch. 5

“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.”

Thomas Mann libro La montaña mágica

Fuente: The Magic Mountain (1924), Ch. 3

“A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.”

As quoted in The New York Times (21 June 1939)

“A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a truth.”

Thomas Mann libro La montaña mágica

Fuente: The Magic Mountain (1924), Ch. 2, “At Tienappels’,” (1924), trans. by H.T. Lowe-Porter (1928).

“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.”

Essay on Freud (16 May 1929)

“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.”

Thomas Mann libro La muerte en Venecia

Fuente: Death in Venice (1912), Ch. 2, as translated by David Luke

“Beauty can pierce one like pain.”

Freud and the Future (1937)

“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.”

Buddenbrooks [Buddenbrooks: Verfall einer Familie, Roman], Pt 11, Ch. 2

“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.”

Letter to the dean of the Philosophical Faculty, Bonn University (January 1937)

“Our air up here is good for the disease — I mean good against the disease,… but it is also good for the disease.”

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) http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114269/thomas-mann-stands-anti-semitism-stacks

“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.”

Thomas Mann libro La montaña mágica

Fuente: The Magic Mountain (1924), Ch. 4

“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.”

Thomas Mann libro Tonio Kröger

Fuente: Tonio Kröger (1903), Ch. 9, as translated by Bayard Quincy Morgan

“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.”

Buddenbrooks [Buddenbrooks: Verfall einer Familie, Roman] (1901). Pt 8, Ch. 2

“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.”

Thomas Mann libro La montaña mágica

Fuente: The Magic Mountain (1924), Ch. 4

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

Thomas Mann libro La montaña mágica

Fuente: The Magic Mountain (1924), Ch. 5

“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.”

Suffering and Greatness of Richard Wagner (1933)

“The invention of printing and the Reformation are and remain the two outstanding services of central Europe to the cause of humanity.”

Thomas Mann libro La montaña mágica

Fuente: The Magic Mountain (1924), Ch. 4

“The positive thing about the sceptic is that he considers everything possible!”

Thomas Mann libro La montaña mágica

Fuente: The Magic Mountain (1924), Ch. 6

“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.”

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

“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.”

Thomas Mann libro Doctor Faustus

Fuente: Doctor Faustus (1947), Ch. 9

“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.”

Thomas Mann libro La montaña mágica

Fuente: The Magic Mountain (1924), Ch. 7