t.

“So long as the child was fed on its mother's milk, everything seemed to it smooth and easy. But when it had to give up milk and take to vodka, - and this is the inevitable law of human development - the childish suckling dreams receded into the realm of the irretrievable past.”
― Lev Shestov, All Things are Possible

“It was better, he thought, to fail in attempting exquisite things than to succeed in the department of the utterly contemptible.”
― Arthur Machen, The Hill of Dreams

“Perhaps one suffers in the tomb. There are corpses that have strange grimaces on their faces when they’re disinterred, as if they remember down there all the filth of this life.”
― Jean Lorrain, The Soul-Drinker and Other Decadent Fantasies

“We live in a world of unreality and dreams. To give up our imaginary position as the center, to renounce it, not only intellectually but in the imaginative part of our soul, that means to awaken to what is real and eternal, to see the true light and hear the true silence...To empty ourselves of our false divinity, to deny ourselves, to give up being the center of the world in imagination, to discern that all points in the world are equally centers and that the true center is outside the world, this is to consent to the rule of mechanical necessity in matter and of free choice at the center of each soul. Such consent is love. The face of this love, which is turned toward thinking persons, is the love of our neighbor; the face turned toward matter is love of the order of the world, or love of the beauty of the world which is the same thing.”
― Simone Weil, Waiting for God