Juliette

“You Christians studied them,” Settembrini exclaimed, “studied the classical poets and philosophers until you broke out in a sweat, attempted to make their precious heritage your own, just as you used the stones of their ancient edifices for your meeting houses. Because you were well aware that no new art could come from your own proletarian souls and hoped to defeat antiquity with its own weapon. And so it will be again, so it will always be. And you with your crude visions of a new morning will likewise have to be taught by those whom—so at least you would like to persuade yourselves, and others—you despise. For without education you cannot prevail before humanity, and there is only one kind of education—you call it bourgeois, but in fact it is human.”
― Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

“Blut ist ein ganz besondrer Saft.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust: Der Tragödie erster und zweiter Teil. Urfaust

“Those who are ignorant of history and the evolution of taste are apt at every turn to make the present age their standard, and imagine nothing so barbarous or savage but what is contrary to the manners of their own time.”
― Anthony Ashley Cooper Shaftesbury

“Before fifty years have passed, we shall be expelled, but my buildings will remain.”
― Cosimo de' Medici