“The body, love, death, these three are just one.”
Hans Castorp to Chauchat, in French, Ch. 5
The Magic Mountain (1924)
Contesto: 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!
Buddenbrooks [Buddenbrooks: Verfall einer Familie, Roman] (1901). Pt 7, Ch. 6
Contesto: 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.
Freud and the Future (1937)
Contesto: 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.
Speech, "The War and the Future" (1940); published in Order of the Day (1942)
Contesto: 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.
Origine: The Magic Mountain (1924), Ch. 7
Contesto: 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.
“The same is true of the passive qualities, patience under suffering, even pleasure in ill usage.”
Origine: The Beloved Returns (1939), Ch. 7
Contesto: 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.
“Passionate — that means to live for the sake of living.”
The Magic Mountain (1924)
Contesto: 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.
“Irony, forsooth! Guard yourself, Engineer, from the sort of irony that thrives up here”
Origine: The Magic Mountain (1924), Ch. 5
Contesto: 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.
Origine: Tristan (1902), Ch. 10
Contesto: 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.
Origine: Tonio Kröger (1903), 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
Contesto: 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.
“Time cools, time clarifies, no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours.”
Origine: The Magic Mountain (1924), Ch. 7
Contesto: 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.
“It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.”
Variante: Love stands opposed to death. It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death.
Origine: The Magic Mountain (1924), Ch. 6; variant translation: 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.
Contesto: Love stands opposed to death. It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death. Only love, not reason, gives kind thoughts.
“Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.”
Origine: The Magic Mountain (1924), Ch. 6, section, A Good Soldier as translated by Woods (1996), p. 506
“War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.”
As quoted in This I Believe (1954), by Edward R. Murrow, p. 16
Variante: War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace.
Origine: This I Believe: The Personal Philosophies of One Hundred Thoughtful Men and Women
“There are so many different kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst.”
Origine: The Magic Mountain
“He probably was mediocre after all, though in a very honorable sense of that word.”
Origine: The Magic Mountain