Jacques Lusseyran

But there is no such night.

For at every waking hour, and even in my dreams, I lived in a stream of light.

Inside me, there was everything I had believed was outside.

There was, in particular,

The sun, light and all colours.

There were even the shapes of objects and the distance between objects.

Everything was there and movement as well.

Light is an element that we carry inside us.

and which can grow there with as much abundance, variety, and intensity as it can outside of us.

I could light myself.

That is, I could create a light inside of me so alive, so large,

and so near that my eyes, my physical eyes, or what remained of them, vibrated almost to the point of hurting.

God is there under a form that has the good luck to be neither religious, nor intellectual, nor sentimental, but quite simply,

I am certain that children always know this more than they are able to tell and that makes the big difference between them and adults who at best know only a fraction of what they say

The reason is simply that children know everything with their whole being, while we know it only with our heads.

Unhappiness comes to each of us because we think ourselves at the centre of the world.

because we have the miserable conviction that we alone suffer to the point of unbearable intensity.

Unhappiness is always to feel oneself imprisoned in one's own skin, in one's own brain.

Sight is a miraculous instrument offering us all the riches of physical life.

But we get nothing in this world without paying for it.