Everything excellent limits us momentarily because we feel unable to match up to it; only insofar as we subsequently accept it into our own culture, absorb it as belonging to our own mental and temperamental powers, do we come to love and value it.

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "Everything excellent limits us momentarily because we feel unable to match up to it; only insofar as we subsequently accept it into our own culture, absorb it as belonging to our own mental and temperamental powers, do we come to love and value it." in the context of "Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Maxims and Reflections (1833), Elisabeth Stopp, trans. (Penguin: 1998) #348" to mean that wisdom is timeless.