You English are never as thorough, never as decided, never as dead-set in your views as your cousins over the Channel. You are a people of compromise… - Oscar Levy

Some one wrote to me upon the publication of my book two years ago: “But you live in England! Poor man: then you are a preacher in the desert!” So I am. But I owe something to my desert. The desert is an excellent place for anybody who can make use of it, as biblical and post-biblical experience proves. Without my desert I should not have written my book. Without coming to England I should have become a modern creature, going in for money and motor-cars. For I was born with a fatal inclination for such lighter and brighter kind of things. I was born under a lucky star, so to say: I was born with a warm heart and a happy disposition; I was born to play a good figure in one of those delightful fêtes champêtres of Watteau, Lancret, and Boucher, with a nice little shepherdess on my arm, listening to the sweet music of Rossini and drinking the inspiring “Capri bianco” or “Verona soave” of that beautiful country Italy. But the sky over here is not blue—nor grows there any wine in England—and no Rossini ever lived here; and towards the native shepherdesses I adopted the ways of the Christian towards his beautiful ideals: I admired them intensely but kept myself afar. So there was nothing to console your thirsty and disenchanted traveller in the British Sahara. In the depths of his despair, there was sent to him, as to the traveller in the desert, an enchanting vision, a beautiful fata Morgana rising on the horizon of the future, a fertile and promising Canaan of a new creed that had arisen in Germany (there too as a revulsion against the desert): the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche.
So I owe something to the desert. Had I not wandered there so long, I could never have fervently wished to escape nor finally succeeded in coming out of it.

While in the nineteenth century you [Englishmen] have been occupied in consolidating an empire, conquering new countries, and spreading civilization to all parts of the world, you have in true British magnanimity forgotten to confer this blessing upon yourselves.

Goethe, … who lived through the struggle against Napoleon, was once asked how he had managed to exist during the days of shame, defeat, and humiliation. He replied: “I have nothing to complain of. Like one who, from the fastness of a cliff, gazes down on the raging sea, unable to help the ship-wrecked crew, but also out of the reach of the billows—according to Lucretius, a not unpleasant feeling—I have been standing in security, and have watched the fury of the storm passing by me.” … It was not only on the political combats and storms of his emasculate fellow-countrymen that Goethe looked down with indifference; to those troubles of the heart, which Rousseau’s teaching had quickened, a philanthropic and educational enthusiasm, he was not merely apathetic ; he was positively hostile. … “As of old Lutherdom, so now French ideals are forcing us away from a peaceful development of culture,” he used to say.