“When a noble life has prepared old age, it is not decline that it reveals, but the first days of immortality.
“Beauty is all very well at first sight; but who ever looks at it when it has been in the house three days?
“Imagination disposes of everything; it creates beauty, justice, and happiness, which are everything in this world
“Even in the centuries which appear to us to be the most monstrous and foolish, the immortal appetite for beauty has always found satisfaction
“Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time
“Unquestionably, it is possible to do without happiness; it is done involuntarily by nineteen-twentieths of mankind
“I am accustomed to sleep and in my dreams to imagine the same things that lunatics imagine when awake
“Only the dreamer shall understand realities, though in truth his dreaming must be not out of proportion to his waking