Without being known too well, it [India] has existed for millennia in the imagination of the Europeans as a wonderland. Its fame, which it has always… - Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

A boy throws stones into the stream, and then looks with wonder at the circles which follow in the water, regarding them as a result in which he sees something of his own doing. This human need runs through the most varied phenomena up to that particular form of self-reproduction in the external fact which is presented us in human art. And it is not merely in relation to external objects that man acts thus. He treats himself, that is, his natural form, in similar manner: he will not permit it to remain as he finds it; he alters it deliberately. This is the rational grounds of all ornament and decoration, though it may be as barbarous, tasteless, entirely disfiguring, nay, as injurious as the crushing of the feet of Chinese ladies, or the slitting of ears and lips.

Translation: But it is rather true that the people, in so far as this term signifies a special part of the citizens, does not know what it wants.

the concept of eternity must not be grasped as if it were suspended time, or in any case not in the sense that eternity would come after time, for this would turn eternity into the future, in other words into a moment of time. And the concept of eternity must also not be understood in the sense of a negation of time, so that it would be merely an abstraction of time. For time in its concept is, like the concept itself generally, eternal, and therefore also absolute presence.