Tonio Kröger Quotes

My deepest and most secret love belongs to the blond and blue-eyed, the bright-spirited living ones, the happy, amiable, and commonplace.

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.

What they, in their innocence, cannot comprehend is that a properly constituted, healthy, decent man never writes, acts, or composes.

What is uttered is finished and done with.

This longing for the bliss of the commonplace.

One must die to life in order to be utterly a creator.

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

He who loves the more is the inferior and must suffer.