No, not of course at all–it is really all hocus-pocus. The days lengthen in the winter-time, and when the longest comes, the twenty-first of June, the beginning of summer, they begin to go downhill again, toward winter. You call that ‘of course’; but if one once loses hold of the fact that it is of course, it is quite frightening, you feel like hanging on to something. It seems like a practical joke–that spring begins at the beginning of winter, and autumn at the beginning of summer. You feel you’re being fooled, led about in a circle, with your eye fixed on something that turns out to be a moving point. A moving point in a circle. For the circle consists of nothing but such transitional points without any extent whatever; the curvature is incommensurable, there is no duration of motion, and eternity turns out to be not ‘straight ahead’ but ‘merry-go-round’!. Thomas Mann
About This Quote

The idea of this quote is the way we view time. We tend to think that time is a circle, so we think it goes around and around and we cannot escape its grip. There are many ways to explain this concept of time, but the important idea is that we should try to see time as a loop and each moment as a separate entity. Time does not repeat itself, and we should never think that everything happens over and over again.

Source: The Magic Mountain

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More Quotes By Thomas Mann
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