"Enchanted woods are rare. But I suspect that where they exist, and seem — so deep is their magic — to march nowhere on reality, they are most often within a stone's-throw of the dear homes of every day ; nor is it needful to travel very far afield in order to find them."

"The spectacle was born from the world's loss of unity, and the immense expansion of the modern spectacle reveals the enormity of this loss."

"Give us spare time, Holy Jerome, and joyful energy to use it."

"I am thinking less than before of a doctor. Psychoanalysis is too basic a help for me, it helps once and for all, it clears out, and to find myself cleared out one day would perhaps be even more hopeless than this disorder."

"I should prefer to be miserable, ill, and feared, and live in some out of the way corner, than to be "settled” and given my place in modern mediocrity!"

"In short, I can say all I think, and what I want to do is to test once and for all to what extent modern mankind — so proud of its freedom of thought — can endure free thought."

"This is a play of repentance, power, revenge and fate that can also be seen as fantasy, dream, imagination, metaphor or magic."

"One can scarcely imagine the unspeakable change that was wrought in man’s emotional life when he took farewell from that almost wholly antique world."

"To be sure, Flaubert experienced from childhood on an unquestionable fondness for privacy and solitude. A well-heated room, books and leisure seemed to the young Gustave the most desirable conditions for happiness."

"Midway through his life, Dante, on the eve of Good Friday, 1300, discovers that he has strayed from the True Way of the religious life, and has wandered into the Dark Wood of Error, where he must spend a miserable night."

"If we look deeply into the essence of things, into the horror of existence, Nietzsche thinks we will be overwhelmed — paralyzed. Like Hamlet we will not be able to act, because we see that action can "not change anything in the eternal nature of things."

"Yalom describes four primary issues of existence (or "ultimate concerns") — death, freedom, isolation, and meaninglessness."

"An artist is by temperament a person who sees things as they are in themselves, not in those rough convenient categories which serve for the business of life."

"The figure of Christ, to us an entirely symbolical figure, is the interpretation of that old Osiris myth of Egypt."

"But one thing I will tell you: the exploration of the unconscious has in fact and in truth discovered the age-old, timeless way of initiation."

"The human characteristic is consciousness; the characteristic of consciousness is a process of perpetual exhaustion, of detachment without rest or exclusion from everything that comes before it."

"With departing Venus, large to the last, and shining even to the edge of the horizon, the vast dome presents at this moment, such a spectacle !"

"It is, I imagine, common in youth to feel in quick succession a number of different attitudes towards life and the world, and to feel each in turn as strongly as if it had no competitors."

""We must have our bread." But what is our bread ? Is it baker's bread ? Methinks it should be very home-made bread."

"The opus magnum had two aims: the rescue of the human soul and the salvation of the cosmos."

"The abstract nature of work in a technological age leaves the worker dissatisfied."