“Turn round,” said the merchant, suddenly catching up the lamp in order to light up the opposite wall. “Look at that leathern skin...”

"I love the stillness of the wood / I love the music of the rill / I love to couch in pensive mood / Upon some silent hill."

"Of three metamorphoses of the spirit do I tell you: how the spirit becomes a camel, the camel a lion, and the lion at last a child."

"One cold winter's day, a number of porcupines huddled together quite closely in order to prevent themselves from being frozen..."

Statue of the Goddess Bastet, 26th Dynasty, Egypt "It is in Ancient Egypt where the cat flourished..."

"And you dear friend, what are you doing at this hour ? Grubbing also, alone also... ?"

Camille Pissarro - Le jardin des Tuileries, effet de neige (1900) "The Garden of Tuileries, Snow Effect" Camille Pissarro - Le Louvre...

"The essence of thought, as the essence of life, is growth."

"Aside I turn to the holy, unspeakable, mysterious Night. Afar lies the world, sunk in a deep grave; waste and lonely is its place."

"Passer-by. — Almanacs for the New Year ? / Alm. Seller. — Yes, Sir. / Passer-by. — Do you think this New Year will be a happy one ?"

"The Dürer coat-of-arms is both an ideogram for “Gateway in Heaven” and a rebus for “I engrave the gateway”..."

"Up to this period it had been his custom to dine at a table d'hôte. But he now began to keep house himself..."

"At last, becoming a complete misanthrope, he used to live spending his time in walking about the mountains; feeding on grasses and plants."

"When he was asked what advantage he had ever derived from philosophy, he replied: “The advantage of being able to converse with myself"."

[Extracts] "Time makes even bronze grow old : but thy glory, Diogenes, all eternity will never destroy..."

"Men ... ought to make the search after wisdom their principal care ; for wisdom is the true nourishment of the mind." Descartes

"Perhaps no one of all the men of genius who have lived in recent times has had so lonely a soul and led so lonely a life as Leopardi."

[Extracts] “Art is the quest of our self that drives us along the eternal and never-ending journey we must all make.” ― Max Beckmann

"Life, to us, that means constantly transforming all that we are into light and flame..."

"When weary with the long day's care And earthly change from pain to pain And lost, and ready to despair Thy kind voice calls me back again"

"A slow and mournful chant arose, the "De Profundis"."

"And this we can contrive with an Elstir, with a Vinteuil; with men like these we do really fly from star to star."

"But how to heal myself ? How transform despair into hope, weakness into willpower ?"

[Extract] "Charles Baudelaire was then an almost unknown genius, preparing himself in the shadow for the light to come..."