A Blogger's Right

Remy de Gourmont says somewhere that "the man of letters loves not only to be read but to be seen. Happy to be by himself, he would be happier still if people knew that he was happy to be by himself, working in solitude at night under his lamp; and he would be indeed happiest of all if, after he has closed his door, his servant should open it for a visitor and show to the importunate fellow, through the chink, the man of letters happy to be by himself."
— Source Unknown

....; I thought then of the woman of thirty, the symbol of the ancient and eternal Snake and of the men who have written of her, and I realized then the immitigable chasm between all life and all print — that those who can, do, those who cannot and suffer enough because they can't, write about it. Then I was free, I could see her again, I saw her still watching me with that dark inscrutable look....
— William Faulkner, The Unvanquished, p. 262.

This is the discovery that intoxicated the Greeks: that the reality of the sensible universe is constituted by a necessity whose laws are the symbolic expression of the mysteries of faith.
— Simone Weil, "Notes on Cleanthes, Pherecydes, Anaximander, and Philolaus," in On Science, Necessity, and the Love of God

Then the revelation occurred: Marino saw the rose as Adam might have seen it in Paradise, and he thought that the rose was to be found in its own eternity and not in his words; and that we may mention or allude to a thing, but not express it; and that the tall, proud volumes casting a golden shadow in a corner were not — as his vanity had dreamed — a mirror of the world, but rather one thing more added to the world.
— Jorge Luis Borges, "A Yellow Rose," in Dreamtigers (El Hacedor), p. 38.

This is the last stanza of François Villon's poem "Le Debat Du Cuer Et Du Corps De Villon" ("Villon's Dialogue With His Heart." The italic are his Heart's replies:
"You want to live?" — God give me strength to do so!" — "You then must..." — "What?" — "Feel penitent and read unceasingly." — "What sort of things?" — "Graver subjects, and leave your foolish friends." — "I'll think about it." — "Now don't forget." — "I've made a note of it." — "Don't wait so long that things get worse. I say no more." — "That's quite alright with me."
— in The Complete Works of François Villon, Anthony Bonner (tr.)

It makes one's heart ache when one sees that a man has staked his soul upon some end, the hopeless imperfection and futility of which is immediately obvious to everyone but himself. But isn't this, after all, merely a matter of degree? Isn't the pathetic grandeur of human existence in some way bound up with the eternal disproportion in this world, where self-delusion, is necessary to life, between the honesty of the striving and the nullity of the result? That we all — every one of us — take ourselves seriously is not merely ridiculous.
— Dag Hammarskjöld, Markings (Diary 1925-1961), p. 13.

What I ask for is absurd: that life shall have a meaning.
     What I strive for is impossible: that life shall acquire a meaning.
     I dare not believe, I do not see how I shall ever be able to believe: that I am not alone.
— Ibid., 1952, p. 86.