"Evil is done without effort, naturally, it is the working of fate; good is always the product of an art."

"The growth of the spirit is a tragic growth, which implies ever-increasing pain and destruction, but it nevertheless is a movement of becoming which marks a kind of progression. The failures are not just an alignment of identical absurdities, each one is enriched by the knowledge of the one that precedes it and the spirit grows by reflecting upon its successive aberrations."

~ Paul De Man, “The Double Aspect of Symbolism” in which he meditates upon the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé as a poetry of becoming versus Charles Baudelaire’s poetry of being and in this “contrast is summarized the double aspect of Symbolism.”