Plato’s insistence that philosophers should rule the state would create a dangerous Utopia if it merely impled that the ruler should be a philosopher… - Thomas Mann

Translation: What we call mourning for our dead is perhaps not so much grief at not being able to call them back as it is grief at not being able to want to do so.

I stand between two worlds. I am at home in neither, and I suffer in consequence. You artists call me a bourgeois, and the bourgeois try to arrest me...I don't know which makes me feel worse.

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.