One's emotions in Rome were one's private affair, like one's glass of
absinthe before dinner in the Palais Royal; they must be hurtful, else
they could not have been so intense; and they were surely immoral, for
no one, priest or politician, could honestly read in the ruins of Rome
any other certain lesson than that they were evidence of the just
judgments of an outraged God against all the doings of man. This moral
unfitted young men for every sort of useful activity; it made Rome a
gospel of anarchy and vice: the last place under the sun for educating
the young; yet it was, by common consent, the only spot that the young
-- of either sex and every race -- passionately, perversely, wickedly,
loved.
-- Henry Adams The Education of Henry Adams (1918)
p.90-91.
"...one had learned from Socrates to distrust, above all other traps,
the trap of logic -- the mirror of the mind. Yet the search for a unit of
force led into catacombs of thought where hundreds of thousands of
educations had found their end. Generation after generation of
painful and honest-minded scholars had been content to stay in these
labyrinths forever, pursuing ignorance in silence, in company with the
most famous teachers of all time. Not one of them had ever found a
logical highroad of escape."
-- Henry Adams. The Education of Henry Adams (1918)
p.407.