May no one say that I lack religion. Opium, too, is a religion.

The town itself is beautiful, and looks its best when you turn your back on it.

By and large the inhabitants of Gottinger may be divided into students, professors, philistines and cattle; which four classes are by no means sharply distinct.

There is a wonderful murmuring and babbling, the birds sing fragmentary sounds of yearning, the trees whisper like a thousand girls’ tongues, the strange mountain flowers gaze like a thousand girls’ eyes, stretching out their wondrous broad leaves with their comical serrations, the merry sunbeams flash playfully to and fro, the wise herbs tell one another green fairy-tales, everything seems enchanted, the sense of cozy seclusion grows even stronger, an ancient dream comes to life, the beloved appears – but alas, she soon disappears again!

Her face resembled a palimpsest where the half-erased verses of an ancient Greek love-poet peep from under the monastic black letters of a text by a Father of the church.

He looked like a life-sized reproduction of a fool.

It is a feeling of infinite bliss when the visible world converges with that of our hearts, and green trees, thoughts, birdsong, melancholy, the blue of heaven, memory and fragrance are twined together in sweet arabesques.

It is still morning, the sun has already traversed half its course, and my heart is already giving off such a fragrance that it is going to my head and making me so giddy that I can no longer tell when irony stops and the sky starts, I populate the air with my sighs, and I myself should like to dissolve into sweet atoms, into the uncreated divinity; what will happen when night falls, and the stars appear in the sky…

Life is too, too comically sweet; and the world is so delightfully confused; it is the dream of an intoxicated god, who took French leave from the company of divine wine-bibbers, and lay down to sleep on a lonely star, and does not know himself that he creates everything he dreams of – but it will not be long before the god wakes up, and rubs his sleepy eyes, and smiles – and our world will fade into nothingness, indeed it will never have existed.

To me, every woman is the gift of a world, I revel in the melodies of her face, and with a single glance from my eye I can enjoy more than others can with their whole bodies in all their lives.

— Heinrich Heine