'Niebuhr was right,' said Goethe, 'when he saw a new age of barbarism coming. It's already here, and we are right in the middle of it; for what else is barbarism, if not a refusal to acknowledge excellence?'
»Niebuhr hat Recht gehabt,« sagte Goethe, »wenn er eine barbarische Zeit kommen sah. Sie ist schon da, wir sind schon mitten darinne; denn worin besteht die Barbarei anders als darin, daß man das Vortreffliche nicht anerkennt?«
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Monday, November 18, 2024
A New Age of Barbarism
Johann Peter Eckermann, Conversations with Goethe, March 22, 1831 (tr. Ritchie Robertson):