Order and simplification are the first steps toward mastery of a subject — the actual enemy is the unknown. - Thomas Mann

Is not the pastness of the past the more profound, the more legendary, the more immediately it falls before the present ?

Technology and comfort - having those, people speak of culture, but do not have it.

Was it an intellectual consequence of this ‘rebirth,’ of this new dignity and rigor, that, at about the same time, his sense of beauty was observed to undergo an almost excessive resurgence, that his style took on the noble purity, simplicity and symmetry that were to set upon all his subsequent works that so evident and evidently intentional stamp of the classical master.