Begging him to wait a few moments, she stepped under the tree, looked up with an ineffable smile, and poured many roses out of her apron on the grass. She kneeled quietly beside it, but soon arose again and led the pilgrim away.

With what assurance a poet can follow the promptings of his inspiration, or, if he is also possessed of a super mundane sense, follow higher beings and surrender to his calling with childlike humility.

– Novalis

In everyone’s life there is something implacable.

– Ruth Sawtell Wallis

A liberation of the less conscious levels of the mind, an intoxicating dreaming.

– F. L. Lucas

The addition of strangeness to beauty.

– Walter Pater

A quest for wonders: fascination with the mysterious, the fantastic, the magical and the supernatural, but also with manifestations of the subconscious, dreams, hypnotism, somnambulism, clairvoyance, madness.

– Helene Scher

This, combined with the rustling of the birches at the window and the song of a distant nightingale, made such an odd mixture that it never felt as if I was awake but seemed instead as if I were sinking into another, even stranger, dream.

The most marvelous things mingled with the most ordinary, the world around him was enchanted, and he was incapable of a single thought, a single memory.

– Ludwig Tieck

Art displays the absolute balance between unconscious and conscious activity which is otherwise not possible in experience and which is thinkable only in infinity. It is only in art that the sensual and spiritual worlds merge…

– Oskar Walzel