"While Hesse recognized that ideas of degeneration existed during this period, he warned the reader not to yield to despair."

“Is illness a prerequisite for the deepest insights ? Kierkegaard, Nietzsche ? Hölderlin ?”

[Book] "Today, mankind believes itself able to do without Art. It does not wish to meditate, to contemplate, to dream..."

"In 1860, Dostoevsky began to formally write about his prison experience in a serial work he called Notes from a Dead House."

"One could say .. that the persona is that which in reality one is not, but which oneself as well as others think one is." Jung

[Essay] "The aim of this essay is to make the mystical, or contemplative elements of Rimbaud's life and poetry clear."

"A Comparison of the Subject Matter and Thought of Montaigne's and Bacon's Essays "

"Few writer’s rooms are quite so emblematic as the strange solipsistic environment of Proust’s cork-lined bedchamber..."

"For Hamlet and heroes such as him, loneliness represents fulfilment, even if on another level."

"There stand your noble, silent comrades, waiting in their ranks. Pass your eye down their files. Choose your man."

"Of all things which men do or make here below by far the most momentous, wonderful, and worthy are the things we call books."

"Being a disease of self-consciousness — insomnia perhaps inevitably plagues a disproportionately high number of writers."

"He was bred to no profession," says Emerson ;"he never married; he lived alone; he never went to church; he never voted..."

"Those who have read both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are often struck by the resemblance not only between many of their ideas"

[Essay] "Chekhov possessed a practical wisdom that enabled him to care for those he loved and to help others."

"Schopenhauer’s philosophy reveals a profound psychology of saintliness, of inner resignation, true composure, true desirelessness."

"Artistic creativity is the vehicle for the transformation of the sorrows of the world into beauty, truth and art."

"The meaning of his aloneness is that, as bringer of light or changer of consciousness, Endymion must overcome darkness."

"Jaspers poses the ancient and Renaissance question of the relationship between diseased psyche and creativity."

"The Odyssey describes a spiritual quest from multiplicity and Strife back to unity and Love."

"Tolstoy called Chekhov, ­­and rightly so, "an artist of life". (...)"

"Hamlet's mind," the critic says, "is constantly occupied with the world within, and abstracted from the world without."