"And, just like Saint-Simon, seemingly a shallow courtier at the king’s court, secretly he becomes the actor and judge of an entire epoch."

"At first he noticed merely that he was different from the ruck, that he was more delicately poised, more sensitive, more keen-sighted."

"FEW have lied more arrantly or quizzed the world with greater delight than Stendhal; few have told the truth with more profundity than he."

"MANY YEARS a favorite wish has accompanied me. This favorite wish was a pretty one, — a refuge."

"Perhaps you have hit upon the ideal of being a poet because you see a poet as an original, a perceptive and a pious man, pure in heart..."

"Pourquoi serais-je de cette planète, me suis-je dit, puisque je ne pense pas comme les autres ?"

"Nous-mêmes, les vivants, que faisons-nous d'autre que de nous dissoudre dans l'évaporation des heures et de flotter sur l'aile des choses?"

"Il est très tard. Tu es allongé dans ton lit et tu ne peux pas dormir."

Hermann Hesse ; Casa Rossa, 1937 Hermann Hesse Propos sur les joies modestes de l’existence (1899) Des pans entiers de la population...

'I believe what we lack is joy. The ardor that a heightened awareness imparts to life,.."

"Tout ce qui est visible est la manifestation d’une signification ; la nature entière est image, langage, hiéroglyphe coloré."

"Thus it was not long before I began to see the world as long-voyage sailors must always have seen it."

"We can count these stars, and yet we cannot believe that we exist as far as they are concerned."

"Go and sit in a grove or woods, with one or more of those voiceless companions, and read the foregoing, and think."

"So we say farewell to a dear and faithful friend, whose virtues we remember — and dogs have few faults."

"Words, then, are not useful. Let us now enquire into their other quality, their positive quality, that is, their power to tell the truth."

" But here, none too soon, are the second-hand bookshops. Here we find anchorage in these thwarting currents of being..."

"Little by little I made an inner life for myself. I read a great deal of Hugo and Gautier. We begin with the picturesque and the romantic."

"Sheer misery makes one profound. — But here there are no problems, mere existence needs no justification, thinking becomes a game."

"I lie and gaze into the evening skv. which for hours has been slowly covering itself with small, silent, tangled clouds."

"There is a kind of rainy weather that is refreshing and cheerful. Today's weather is not."

"Emily Dickinson did not give up the world but neither could she find I herself in the world, so she retired from it."

"Hamlet is so familiar to us because he knows, really knows, that he is his own worst problem."

"Sleep — real sleep, the dear, the cherished one, the lullaby."