“In the history of humanity there are no civilizations or cultures which fail to manifest, in one or a thousand ways, this need for an absolute that is called haeven, freedom, a miracle, a lost paradise to be regained, peace, the going beyond history; there is no era which fails to express the need for man to be transfigured ("the new man", "the superior man" "the superman") or which fails to express the desire for revolution, for the Ideal City, that is to say the desire to purify the world, to change it, to save it, to reintegrate it metaphysically. Humanity has never been satisfied with "reality such as it is". In pagan Greece, where the most perfect harmony seemed to exist between morality and joy, between nature and society, the Platonists, even though they lived beneath the most luminous sky were only a dark cavern and suffered because they were not able to contemplate the only essential light, that of the eternal ideas. The Stoics themselves passively accepted living an absurd, gray, everyday life because their metaphysics promised that wise men after death would contemplate the movements of the stars, that is to say absolute, nonterrestrial beauty. There ir no religion in which everyday life is not considered a prison; there is no philosophy or ideology that does not think that we live in alienation: in one way or another, and even in the ideologies that deny the myths they feed on despite themselves, humanity has always had a nostalgia for the freedom that is only beauty, this is only real life, plenitude, light.”

Eugène Ionesco.