Every Teleut shaman has a spirit wife who lives in the seventh heaven, where he meets her and makes love to her during his ecstatic journeys.

– Mircea Eliade

The possession of her, the Cosmic Shakti, the living embodiment of the principle of beauty and youth eternal, is the ultimate quest, the very highest prize.

– Heinrich Zimmer

The series of universes appear and disappear with the opening and shutting of Her eyes.

– The Lalita Sahasranamam

Beauty is the infinite finitely presented.

– Friedrich Schlegel

He is not interested in the philosophical and moral ideas of the ancients, he wishes to take from antiquity those elements which will help him to build up a dream; and this dream, one feels, became for him more important than the ordinary conduct of life.

But the dream which he spun was a very sweet one, in which he could enjoy all those things which were unattainable to him in real life. Among these is the ideal of perfect love, which is expressed in a very strong erotic element throughout the book. This is usually discretely clothed in allegory, but the covering is sometimes of the thinnest and the symbolism of the most direct kind.

– Sir Anthony Blunt

The spirit of Romanticism ever sought to penetrate through the mass of sense impressions to the ultimate secret which lay buried behind these myriad perceptions and, dreamily presentient, to grasp the truth not in the trite and obvious every-day things but in the realm of the super-sensual. Animate and inanimate nature, mute in the presence of others, becomes articulate to the Romanticist. Thus spirits, elves, and fairies become quite self-evident, more self-evident indeed than are the Philistines who day after day cross the path of the Romanticists.

The fundamental concept is Novalis’s faith both in the sheer magic of poetry, which enables man to transcend his sense perceptions, and in the state of artistic ecstasy, which reveals the simple truth far more directly than any amount of thinking.

– Oskar Walzel