Has the world ever been changed by anything save the thought and its magic vehicle the Word? - Thomas Mann

Six months at most after they get here, these young people — and they are mostly young who come — have lost every idea they had, except flirtation and temperature.

And for its part, what was life? Was it perhaps only an infectious disease of matter — just as the so-called spontaneous generation of matter was perhaps only an illness, a cancerous stimulation of the immaterial?

However opinionated, perhaps even high-handed his presentations were, he was unquestionably an ingenious man — that was evident in the stimulating, thought-provoking effect his words had on a highly gifted young mind like Adri Leverkühn's. What had chiefly impressed him, as he revealed on the way home and the following day in the schoolyard, was the distinction Kretzschmar had made between cultic and cultural epochs and his observation that the secularization of art, its separation from worship, was of only a superficial and episodic nature. The high-school sophomore was manifestly moved by an idea that the lecturer had not even articulated, but that had caught fire in him:: that the separation of art from any liturgical context, its liberation and elevation to the isolated and personal, to culture for culture's sake, had burdened it with a solemnity without any point of reference, an absolute seriousness, a pathos of suffering epitomized in Beethoven's terrible appearance in the doorway — but that did not have to be its abiding destiny, its perpetual state of mind. Just listen to the young man! With almost no real, practical experience in the field of art, he was fantasizing in a void and in precocious words about art's apparently imminent retreat from its present-day role to a happier, more modest one in the service of a higher fellowship, which did not have to be, as at one time, the Church. What it would be, he could not say.