“There were profound reasons for his attachment to the sea: he loved it because as a hardworking artist he needed rest, needed to escape from the demanding complexity of phenomena and lie hidden on the bosom of the simple and tremendous; because of a forbidden longing deep within him that ran quite contrary to his life's task and was for that very reason seductive, a longing for the unarticulated and immeasurable, for eternity, for nothingness. To rest in the arms of perfection is the desire of any man intent upon creating excellence; and is not nothingness a form of perfection?”

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.