الجمال يجعل الإنسان خجولاً - Thomas Mann

Did we not, at the very moment of birth, stumble into agonizing captivity? A prison, a prison with bars and chains everywhere!

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.

But was it not true that there were people, certain individuals, whom one found it impossible to picture dead, precisely because they were so vulgar? That was to say: they seemed so fit for life, so good at it, that they would never die, as if they were unworthy of the consecration of death.