“For passion, like crime does not sit well with the sure order and even course of everyday life. It welcomes every loosening of the social fabric, every confusion and affliction visited upon the world, for passion sees in such a disorder a vague hope of finding advantage for itself.”

German novelist and Nobel Prize in Literature laureate

Thomas Mann was a German novelist, short story writer, essayist, social critic, and philanthropist. Active in the modern period, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929 and remains closely associated with the literary life of twentieth-century Europe. He is known for highly symbolic and ironic novels and novellas that probe the psychology of the artist and the intellectual. His work often reworks German and biblical stories, while drawing on the ideas of Goethe, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer to examine the European and German mind.