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Who said: “I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, ... finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell ... whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”
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Home > Dictionary of Science Quotations > Scientist Names Index M > Thomas Mann Quotes

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Thomas Mann
(6 Jun 1875 - 12 Aug 1955)

German-American writer who was awarded the 1929 Nobel Prize in Literature. He went into voluntary exile in Switzerland (1933) and his German citizenship was revoked in 1936. He became a natuarlized Czech citizen in 1936, immigrated to the U.S. (1938) where he became a citizen in 1944, then immigrated to Switzerland in 1952. He wrote novels, short fiction works and non-fiction essays

Science Quotes by Thomas Mann (6 quotes)

A great truth is a truth whose opposite is also a great truth.
— Thomas Mann
Essay on Freud (1937). Quoted in Charles W. Misner, Kip S. Thorne and John Archibald Wheeler, Gravitation (1973), 1208.
Science quotes on:  |  Great (1610)  |  Opposite (110)  |  Truth (1109)

Disease makes men more physical, it leaves them nothing but body.
— Thomas Mann
The Magic Mountain (1924, 1965), 178.
Science quotes on:  |  Body (557)  |  Disease (340)  |  More (2558)  |  Nothing (1000)  |  Physical (518)

I shall never forget the sight. The vessel of crystallization was three quarters full of slightly muddy water—that is, dilute water-glass—and from the sandy bottom there strove upwards a grotesque little landscape of variously colored growths: a confused vegetation of blue, green, and brown shoots which reminded one of algae, mushrooms, attached polyps, also moss, then mussels, fruit pods, little trees or twigs from trees, here, and there of limbs. It was the most remarkable sight I ever saw, and remarkable not so much for its profoundly melancholy nature. For when Father Leverkühn asked us what we thought of it and we timidly answered him that they might be plants: “No,” he replied, “they are not, they only act that way. But do not think the less of them. Precisely because they do, because they try as hard as they can, they are worthy of all respect.”
It turned out that these growths were entirely unorganic in their origin; they existed by virtue of chemicals from the apothecary's shop.
— Thomas Mann
Description of a “chemical garden” in Doktor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn, as Told by a Friend, (1947), 19.
Science quotes on:  |  Act (278)  |  Algae (7)  |  Answer (389)  |  Apothecary (10)  |  Ask (420)  |  Attach (57)  |  Attached (36)  |  Brown (23)  |  Chemical (303)  |  Color (155)  |  Crystal (71)  |  Do (1905)  |  Exist (458)  |  Father (113)  |  Forget (125)  |  Fruit (108)  |  Glass (94)  |  Green (65)  |  Growth (200)  |  Hard (246)  |  Inorganic (14)  |  Landscape (46)  |  Little (717)  |  Melancholy (17)  |  Moss (14)  |  Most (1728)  |  Mushroom (4)  |  Mussel (2)  |  Nature (2017)  |  Never (1089)  |  Origin (250)  |  Plant (320)  |  Pod (2)  |  Polyp (4)  |  Precisely (93)  |  Respect (212)  |  Saw (160)  |  Sight (135)  |  Think (1122)  |  Thought (995)  |  Tree (269)  |  Try (296)  |  Turn (454)  |  Twig (15)  |  Upward (44)  |  Vegetation (24)  |  Vessel (63)  |  Virtue (117)  |  Water (503)  |  Way (1214)

I tell them if they will occupy themselves with the study of mathematics they will find in it the best remedy against the lusts of the flesh.
— Thomas Mann
The Magic Mountain (1924, 1965), 417.
Science quotes on:  |  Against (332)  |  Best (467)  |  Find (1014)  |  Lust (7)  |  Mathematics (1395)  |  Remedy (63)  |  Study (701)  |  Tell (344)  |  Themselves (433)  |  Will (2350)

Science never makes an advance until philosophy authorizes it to do so.
— Thomas Mann
Essay on Freud (1937). Quoted in Charles W. Misner, Kip S. Thorne and John Archibald Wheeler, Gravitation (1973), 1208.
Science quotes on:  |  Advance (298)  |  Authorization (3)  |  Authorize (5)  |  Do (1905)  |  Never (1089)  |  Philosophy (409)

Some of the men stood talking in this room, and at the right of the door a little knot had formed round a small table, the center of which was the mathematics student, who was eagerly talking. He had made the assertion that one could draw through a given point more than one parallel to a straight line; Frau Hagenström had cried out that this was impossible, and he had gone on to prove it so conclusively that his hearers were constrained to behave as though they understood.
— Thomas Mann
In Little Herr Friedemann (1961), 25.
Science quotes on:  |  Assertion (35)  |  Behave (18)  |  Conclusive (11)  |  Constrain (11)  |  Door (94)  |  Draw (140)  |  Eager (17)  |  Form (976)  |  Given (5)  |  Impossible (263)  |  Knot (11)  |  Little (717)  |  Mathematics (1395)  |  More (2558)  |  Parallel (46)  |  Point (584)  |  Prove (261)  |  Right (473)  |  Small (489)  |  Straight (75)  |  Straight Line (34)  |  Student (317)  |  Table (105)  |  Talking (76)  |  Through (846)  |  Understand (648)  |  Understood (155)



Quotes by others about Thomas Mann (1)

When Hitler arrived in 1933, the tradition of scholarship in Germany was destroyed, almost overnight. … Europe was no longer hospitable to the imagination—and not just the scientific imagination. A whole conception of culture was in retreat…. Silence fell, as after the trial of Galileo. The great men went out into a threatened world. Max Born. Erwin Schrödinger. Albert Einstein. Sigmund Freud. Thomas Mann. Bertolt Brecht. Arturo Toscanini. Bruno Walter. Marc Chagall. Enrico Fermi. Leo Szilard….
In Ch. 11, 'Knowledge or Certainty', The Ascent of Man, (1973), 367.
Science quotes on:  |  Arrive (40)  |  Max Born (16)  |  Bertolt Brecht (6)  |  Conception (160)  |  Culture (157)  |  Destroy (189)  |  Albert Einstein (624)  |  Europe (50)  |  Fall (243)  |  Enrico Fermi (20)  |  Sigmund Freud (70)  |  Galileo Galilei (134)  |  Germany (16)  |  Adolf Hitler (20)  |  Hospitable (3)  |  Imagination (349)  |  Overnight (2)  |  Retreat (13)  |  Scholarship (22)  |  Erwin Schrödinger (68)  |  Silence (62)  |  Leo Szilard (7)  |  Threaten (33)  |  Tradition (76)  |  Trial (59)  |  Whole (756)  |  World (1850)


Carl Sagan Thumbnail In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion. (1987) -- Carl Sagan
Quotations by:Albert EinsteinIsaac NewtonLord KelvinCharles DarwinSrinivasa RamanujanCarl SaganFlorence NightingaleThomas EdisonAristotleMarie CurieBenjamin FranklinWinston ChurchillGalileo GalileiSigmund FreudRobert BunsenLouis PasteurTheodore RooseveltAbraham LincolnRonald ReaganLeonardo DaVinciMichio KakuKarl PopperJohann GoetheRobert OppenheimerCharles Kettering  ... (more people)

Quotations about:Atomic  BombBiologyChemistryDeforestationEngineeringAnatomyAstronomyBacteriaBiochemistryBotanyConservationDinosaurEnvironmentFractalGeneticsGeologyHistory of ScienceInventionJupiterKnowledgeLoveMathematicsMeasurementMedicineNatural ResourceOrganic ChemistryPhysicsPhysicianQuantum TheoryResearchScience and ArtTeacherTechnologyUniverseVolcanoVirusWind PowerWomen ScientistsX-RaysYouthZoology  ... (more topics)
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- 100 -
Sophie Germain
Gertrude Elion
Ernest Rutherford
James Chadwick
Marcel Proust
William Harvey
Johann Goethe
John Keynes
Carl Gauss
Paul Feyerabend
- 90 -
Antoine Lavoisier
Lise Meitner
Charles Babbage
Ibn Khaldun
Euclid
Ralph Emerson
Robert Bunsen
Frederick Banting
Andre Ampere
Winston Churchill
- 80 -
John Locke
Bronislaw Malinowski
Bible
Thomas Huxley
Alessandro Volta
Erwin Schrodinger
Wilhelm Roentgen
Louis Pasteur
Bertrand Russell
Jean Lamarck
- 70 -
Samuel Morse
John Wheeler
Nicolaus Copernicus
Robert Fulton
Pierre Laplace
Humphry Davy
Thomas Edison
Lord Kelvin
Theodore Roosevelt
Carolus Linnaeus
- 60 -
Francis Galton
Linus Pauling
Immanuel Kant
Martin Fischer
Robert Boyle
Karl Popper
Paul Dirac
Avicenna
James Watson
William Shakespeare
- 50 -
Stephen Hawking
Niels Bohr
Nikola Tesla
Rachel Carson
Max Planck
Henry Adams
Richard Dawkins
Werner Heisenberg
Alfred Wegener
John Dalton
- 40 -
Pierre Fermat
Edward Wilson
Johannes Kepler
Gustave Eiffel
Giordano Bruno
JJ Thomson
Thomas Kuhn
Leonardo DaVinci
Archimedes
David Hume
- 30 -
Andreas Vesalius
Rudolf Virchow
Richard Feynman
James Hutton
Alexander Fleming
Emile Durkheim
Benjamin Franklin
Robert Oppenheimer
Robert Hooke
Charles Kettering
- 20 -
Carl Sagan
James Maxwell
Marie Curie
Rene Descartes
Francis Crick
Hippocrates
Michael Faraday
Srinivasa Ramanujan
Francis Bacon
Galileo Galilei
- 10 -
Aristotle
John Watson
Rosalind Franklin
Michio Kaku
Isaac Asimov
Charles Darwin
Sigmund Freud
Albert Einstein
Florence Nightingale
Isaac Newton


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