"May the Dragon of Envy be far from us, and the Swan of Imprudence, the Cassiopeia of Vanity, the Andromeda of Laziness..."

"What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one."

"The same processes the alchemists employed in contemplation of the transmutation of metals can be used to bring union to the self."

"Patience, patience, patience, is what the sea teaches. One should lie empty, open, choiceless as a beach, waiting for a gift from the sea."

"He was a tone-poet. He seemed to live upon music, the moody food of imagination."

"The shepherd prince's pursuit stands for the human heart's pursuit of Beauty, or Truth, Happiness, Love, Light."

[Essays and documentaries on Hieronymus Bosch's work]

"For Goethe the flower is so much alive that it speaks and warns him; and he solves the problem differently from either Tennyson or Basho."

"The Tempest investigates marriage, love, culture. It is symbolic of man’s rational higher instincts versus his animal natural tendencies."

"Whether or not we are aware of it, there is nothing of which we are more ashamed than of not being ourselves."

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

"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..."

"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

"A group of pleasant people in idyllic surroundings, hopelessly at odds with themselves and with one another."

“Ma vie est l'histoire d'un inconscient qui a accompli sa propre réalisation.” C. G. Jung

[Essay] "Birds are naturally the most joyful creatures in the world...."

"Our regeneration depends on an 'ultraphilosophy' that brings us closer to nature by exploring the entirety and the interior of things."

"After you have done with all your classes, the next thing is a collection of books, a great library of good books."

"One of my mental complications — horrible beyond words — is a fear of insanity, which itself is insanity."

”What one takes from this biography is a sense of a man who wanted simultaneously to be no one and to be everyone."

[Essay] "If one were to compile a list of modernist authors, ... chances are quite good that the authors selected would be insomniacs."