About Gerard De Nerval: Gérard de Nerval was the nom-de-plume of the French writer, poet, essayist and translator Gérard Labrunie, one of the Romantic French poets.
Sleep occupies a third of our life. It is the consolation to the woes of our days or the woe of their pleasures; but I have never found that sleep was a rest. After a swoon of a few minutes a new life begins, freed from conditions of time and space, ...
One third of our life is spent in sleep. It is consolation for the troubles of our waking hours or atonement for their pleasures; but I have never experienced sleep to be mere repose. After a few minutes' lethargy, a new life begins, untrammeled by t...
It is impossible for a Parisian to resist the desire to flick through the old volumes laid out by a bookseller. [ ]
When the soul drifts uncertainly between life and the dream, between the mind's disorder and the return to cool reflection, it is in religious thought that we should seek consolation.
The first moments of sleep are an image of death; a hazy torpor grips our thoughts and it becomes impossible for us to determine the exact instant when the 'I,' under another form, continues the task of existence.
Our dreams are a second life. I have never been able to penetrate without a shudder those ivory or horned gates which separate us from the invisible world.
The tree of knowledge is not the tree of life! And yet can we cast out of our spirits all the good or evil poured into them by so many learned generations? Ignorance cannot be learned.
It has been rightly said that nothing is unimportant, nothing powerless in the universe; a single atom can dissolve everything, and save everything! What terror! There lies the eternal distinction between good and evil.
If there is, to be sure, something more terrifying than the history of the fall of great empires, it is the history of the death of religions. Volney himself was overcome by this feeling as he visited the innumerable ruins of once-sacred buildings. T...
Every flower is a soul blossoming in nature.
