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All subsequent objective perception of the world is only elaboration on the framework the Greeks began. We see with the eyes of the Greeks and use their phrases when we speak.

— Jacob Burckhardt The Greeks and Greek Civilization (1998)

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More quotes by Jacob Burckhardt

History is on every occasion the record of what one age finds worthy of note in another.

Judgements on History and Historians (1929)

Their knowledge and their faculty of observation were extraordinary. By their study of the world the Greeks illuminate not only their own nature but that of all other ancient peoples; without them, and the phillhellenic Romans, there would be no knowledge of past times, for all other nations attended to nothing but themselves, their own citadels, temples and gods.

The Greeks and Greek Civilization (1998)

In the life of the mind they [the Greeks] reached frontiers which the rest of mankind cannot permit themselves to fall short of, at least in their attempts to acknowledge and to profit, even where they are inferior to the Greeks in the capacity for achievement. It is for this reason that posterity needs to study the Greeks; if we ignore them we are simply accepting our own decline.

The Greeks and Greek Civilization (1998)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Jacob Burckhardt (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.