The function of man differs from that of other physical beings, for it is the reparation of the disorders in the universe.

– Louis Claude de Saint-Martin

But the art of pure contemplation, of creative metaphysics, is difficult, requiring earnest, unremitting thought and strict self-discipline, and the reward will not be the applause of his trouble-shunning contemporaries, but only the joy of knowing and being awake, a closer contact with the universe.

It is fitting that the artist should set activity uppermost, for his essence is to act and create with knowledge and will, and his art is ability to use his instrument for every purpose, to reproduce the world in his own way; therefore the principle of his world is activity and his world is his art.

– Novalis

But although Novalis was sexually active, he also felt a need to repress his urges. Erotic fantasies and daydreams obsessed him, and he often sought the company of sexually unattainable women in order to mitigate these desires.

It may be reading too much into a perhaps harmless infatuation, but Sophie seems in many ways a figure of pure sehnsucht: an ideal beauty, who remained, at least for the present, untouchable. Between pure sexual fantasy and the reality of actual sex, she shimmered like a promising dawn.

– Gary Lachman

The unconscious is largely identical with the mental love fantasies in our present and past life. Since the terms "unconscious" and "erotic" according to psychoanalysis are almost synonymous, any serious study of literature which is concerned with the unconscious must deal impartially with eroticism.

– Albert Mordell

It was late in the evening, a time when the teen-age penchant for melodrama tends to be in full flower.

– Calvin Trillin