"Everything passes. Space and time consume beauty, youth, love,
glory, genius. Human life is nothing; death is no better. Worlds
are born and die like ourselves. All is nothing. Yes, yes, yes! All
is nothing.... To love or hate, enjoy or suffer, admire or sneer,
live or die--what does it matter? There is nothing in greatness or
littleness, beauty or ugliness. Eternity is indifferent;
indifference is eternal."[39]

"I am weary of life; and I am forced to see that belief in
absurdities is necessary to human minds, and that it is born in
them as insects are born in swamps."[40]

[Footnote 37: Letters to the Princess of Wittgenstein, 22 July, 21
September, 1862; and August, 1864.]

[Footnote 38: _Mémoires_, II, 335. He shocked Mendelssohn, and even
Wagner, by his irreligion. (See Berlioz's letter to Wagner, 10
September, 1855.)]

[Footnote 39: _Les Grotesques de la Musique_, pp. 295-6.]

[Footnote 40: Letter to the Abbé Girod. See Hippeau, _Berlioz intime_,
p. 434.]

"You make me laugh with your old words about a mission to fulfil.
What a missionary! But there is in me an inexplicable mechanism
which works in spite of all arguments; and I let it work because I
cannot stop it. What disgusts me most is the certainty that beauty
does not exist for the majority of these human monkeys."[41]