"Yet how strange a thing is the beauty of music! The brief beauty that the player brings into being transforms a given period of time into pure continuance; it is certain never to be repeated; like the existence of dayflies and other such short-lived creatures, beauty is a perfect abstraction and creation of life itself. Nothing is so similar to life as music."
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion ~ Yukio Mishima
"From that moment I have found my entertainment in this labor. I
do not mean that this labor, this labor of preparation and
self-development, has been my material support, for till now the
achievement has consisted only in the bit of a Fragment, and in
that I have not found material support, for I have laid out money
on it. However, I cannot require that people should contribute
money for having something made difficult, that in fact would be to
increase the difficulty by a new difficulty, and when one takes
medicine, one is accustomed rather to getting a douceur along with
it. I am so far from failing to understand this, that if I were
as I being a subjective author am not objectively convinced of
the efficacy of the medicine I offer, and believed that it did not
depend simply and solely upon the way in which it is used, so that
the way is really the medicine, I should be the first to promise
every single one of my readers collectively the prospect of taking
part in a lottery of tasteful gifts, in order in this way to
instill into them the strength and courage required for reading my
books. If then it should happen that they who make everything easy
were to perceive that they truly might profit by my bit of
difficulty, lest the easiness become a dead calm; if in their
profound emotion at having thus understood my effort, they should
resolve to support me on the sly with financial contributions, this
would be gladly accepted, and I would make an inviolable promise to
keep it silent, lest humankind, from whom we unitedly derive gain
and profit, should learn to know the true situation."
Becoming Subjective - Concluding Unscientific Postscript ~ Soren Kierkegaard