Friedrich Meinecke

“Florence became a revelation for me that made me infinitely happy. However many works of art of the Italian Renaissance I had already seen in reproductions, and in the originals of the museums of Berlin, Munich and Paris, only now it it appeared to me not only as a beauty to be enjoyed aesthetically, but as the supreme culmination of the life of a highly gifted people, in which civilization and State operated in the most intimate way on each other. And everywhere I also felt the tragedy inherent in this greatness and its fall.”

“The rigorous methodical rules that are learned in seminars, the patient collection and examination of sources and their particular qualities and relationships: all this does not mean coterie pedantry. Instead, it is used like nails and irons applied to shoes, to ascend the steep glacier of knowledge. The image is already too utilitarian, since something ethical is at stake. Those who believe they possess the gift of intuition can feel inquisitive with a clear conscience only if they exercise rigorous methodical criticism and are faithful in small things.”

“Culture means transforming what was learned at school into natural wholeness and humanity.”

“[E]very human life, even the most modest, has its own independent value not only before God, but also before history; even if it were just a wave, or even, a small drop, in the flow of time. In fact, every human life, when it is lived, gives some news of historical transformations on a large scale. And consciously his contribution to them, even minimal, is not lacking. A fundamental secret of historical life is always repeated: something typical, similar in many, is inextricably fused with something purely individual and which is never repeated in the same way.”