pulchrum est paucorum hominum -> beauty is for the few

[spiros]

• Tweet

pulchrum est paucorum hominum -> beauty is for the few

What the "higher schools" in Germany really achieve is a brutal training, designed to prepare huge numbers of young men, with as little loss of time as possible, to become usable, abusable, in government service. "Higher Education" and huge numbers-that is a contradiction to start with. All higher education belongs only to the exception: one must be privileged to have a right to so high a privilege. All great, all beautiful things can never be common property: pulchrum est paucorum hominum. What conditions the decline of German culture? That "higher education" is no longer a privilege—the democratism of Bildung, which has become "common"-too common. Let it not be forgotten that military privileges really compel an all-too-great attendance in the higher schools, and thus their downfall.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the idols

[billberg23]

Interestingly, the Latin was composed by Nietzsche himself, who was of course a classicist.  (Some have tried to attribute the words to Horace, but in vain:  Satires 1.9.44 is not the same.)

[spiros]

Aha, I thought it was Horace...

You refer to this:

...paucorum hominum et mentis bene sanae.

I also find this somewhat relevant:

But unless that be the case, what beauty has an accumulated hoard? Though your thrashing-floor should yield a hundred thousand bushels of corn, your belly will not on that account contain more than mine: just as if it were your lot to carry on your loaded shoulder the basket of bread among slaves, you would receive no more [for your own share] than he who bore no part of the burthen. Or tell me, what is it to the purpose of that man, who lives within the compass of nature, whether he plow a hundred or a thousand acres?

“But it is still delightful to take out of a great hoard.”
http://www.authorama.com/works-of-horace-6.html