An excellent remedy for the monotony of existence

It was a masterstroke for nature to interrupt life, as it were, with sleep. This interruption is almost a renewal, and waking up is like being reborn. In fact, the day also has its own youth, etc., see p. 151. As well as the great variety they provide, these continuous interruptions make a single life feel like so many different ones. And separating one day from another is an excellent remedy for the monotony of existence."
*

The origin of a profound sense of unhappiness, or the development of what is called sensibility, usually comes from the lack or the loss of great and vivid illusions. And, in fact, it was in Latium that Virgil first gave expression to this sentiment, at the precise moment that all great and vivid illusions were fading for ordinary Romans, who had lived by them for so long, and life and public affairs had become ordered and monotonous. The sensibility you see in young people still unfamiliar with the world and its ills, although tinged with melancholy, is different from this experience, and promises and gives to those who possess it not pain but pleasure and happiness. (6 Sept. 1820.)"
*

"It is a property of works of genius that, even when they represent vividly the nothingness of things, even when they clearly show and make you feel the inevitable unhappiness of life, even when they express the most terrible despair, nevertheless to a great soul that finds itself in a state of extreme dejection, disenchantment, nothingness, boredom, and discouragement about life, or in the most bitter and deathly misfortune (whether on account of lofty, powerful passions or something else), such works always bring consolation, [260] and rekindle enthusiasm, and, though they treat and represent nothing but death, they restore, albeit momentarily, the life that it had lost. And so, while that which is seen in the reality of things grieves and kills the soul, when seen in imitation or any other form in works of genius (e.g., in lyric poetry, which is not, properly speaking, imitation), it opens and revives the heart. In fact, just as the author who described and felt so powerfully the vanity of illusions, but still preserved a great fund of them and gave ample proof of this by conveying their vanity so accurately (see pp. 214–15), in the same way, the reader, however disillusioned both about himself and about what he reads, is yet drawn by the author into the same deception and illusion that he experienced and that are hidden in the most intimate recesses of his spirit. And the recognition of the irredeemable vanity and falsity of all beauty and all greatness is itself a kind of beauty and greatness that fills the soul when it is conveyed by a work of genius."

(from "Zibaldone" by Giacomo Leopardi)