"You must try, Psyche, to use up all your facility against an obstacle; face the granite, rouse yourself against it, and for a while despair. See your vain enthusiasms and your frustrated aims fall away. Perhaps you lack sufficient wisdom yet prefer your will to your ease. You find that stone too hard, you dream of the softness of wax and the obedience of clay? Follow the path of your aroused thought and you will soon meet this infernal inscription: There is nothing so beautiful as that which does not exist."
Paul Valéry - 'Concerning Adonis', qtd. in Lee Harwood, 'The Long Black Veil' in Collected Poems, p. 183.
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