[S]ome went through the whole disrupting experience of national indignity as early as 1933, others after June 1934, still others in 1938 during the J… - Karl Jaspers

Crucial for man is his attitude toward failure: whether it remains hidden from him and overwhelms him only objectively at the end or whether he perceives it unobscured as the constant limit of his existence; whether he snatches at fantastic solutions and consolations or faces it honestly, in silence before the unfathomable. The way in which man approaches his failure determines what he will become.

… Nietzsche’s ideas and plans: for example, the idea of giving up the whole wretched academic world to form a secular monastic community.

Even the best institutions at the university are apt to deteriorate and to become distorted. Thus the very translation of thought into teachable form tends to impoverish its intellectual vitality. Once intellectual achievement is admitted into the body of accepted learning those achievements tend to assume an air of finality. Thus, it is merely a matter of convention at what point one subject ends and the other begins. It is possible, moreover, that an excellent scholar may not be able to find a place for himself within the established departmental divisions. A mediocre scholar may be preferred to him simply because his work fits into the traditional scheme. Any institution tends to consider itself an end in itself.