For an idea ever to be fashionable is ominous, since it must afterwards be always old-fashioned. - George Santayana

Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.

Wer sich an die Vergangenheit nicht erinnert, ist dazu verdammt sie zu wiederholen.

….ideal goods cannot be assimilated without some training and leisure. Like education and religion they are degraded by popularity, and reduced from what the master intended to what the people are able and willing to receive. So pleasing an idea, then, as this of diffused ideal possessions has little application in a society aristocratically framed; for the greater eminence the few attain the less able are the many to follow them. Great thoughts require a great mind and pure beauties a profound sensibility. To attempt to give such things a wide currency is to be willing to denaturalise them in order to boast that they have been propagated. Culture is on the horns of this dilemma: if profound and noble it must remain rare, if common it must become mean.