“In Greece the profound, thorough, serious spirits were the exceptions: the instinct of the people was inclined, rather, to regard seriousness and thoroughness as a kind of distortion. Not to create forms but to borrow them from abroad and transform them into the fairest appearance of beauty — that is Greek: imitation, not for use but for the end of artistic deception, the repeated defeating of an imposed seriousness, ordering, beautifying, making shallow and superficial — that is the course they pursued.”
– Friedrich Nietzsche, Assorted Opinions and Maxims, 221
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