[...] I have no better advice to offer you than this, since I have discovered in my own case that I was truly unhappy only as long as I was not a whole person, but sought the impossible, and strove to reconcile fire and water, good and evil. - Now - however much I suffer and however violent the pains I bear - I yet do not suffer any longer; I face death at every moment, and in that way regain my love of life, for I can be contented and proud — because I despise a life which has no true content. -
[...]
Source: Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), No. 109