I would like to believe that hashish persuades nature to permit us — for less egoistic purposes — that squandering of our existence that we know in love. For if, when we love, our existence runs through nature’s fingers like golden coins that she cannot hold and lets fall so that they can thus purchase new birth, she now throws us, without hoping or expecting anything, in ample handfuls, toward existence.

Walter Benjamin, Hashish in Marseilles