"There are moments of existence when time and space are more profound, and the awareness of existence is immensely heightened."

"This life is a hospital in which every patient is possessed with a desire to change his bed."

"Always be a poet, even in prose."

"As a small child, I felt in my heart two contradictory feelings, the horror of life and the ecstasy of life."

"Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and calculation."

"Nature... is nothing but the inner voice of self-interest."

"There is no such thing as a long piece of work, except one that you dare not start."

"The life of our city is rich in poetic and marvelous subjects. We are enveloped and steeped as though in an atmosphere of the marvelous; but we do not notice it."

"The world only goes round by misunderstanding."

"Nearly all our originality comes from the stamp that time impresses upon our sensibility."

"For each letter received from a creditor, write fifty lines on an extraterrestrial subject and you will be saved."

"There is no more steely barb than that of the Infinite."

"We are weighed down, every moment, by the conception and the sensation of Time. And there are but two means of escaping and forgetting this nightmare: pleasure and work. Pleasure consumes us. Work strengthens us. Let us choose."

"The dance can reveal everything mysterious that is hidden in music, and it has the additional merit of being human and palpable. Dancing is poetry with arms and legs."

"What is art? Prostitution."

"Nothing can be done except little by little."

"To the solemn graves, near a lonely cemetery, my heart like a muffled drum is beating funeral marches."

"What is exhilarating in bad taste is the aristocratic pleasure of giving offense."

"Modernity signifies the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art of which the other half is the eternal and the immutable."

"A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else."

"Those men get along best with women who can get along best without them."

"Music fathoms the sky."

"Even in the centuries which appear to us to be the most monstrous and foolish, the immortal appetite for beauty has always found satisfaction."

"An artist is an artist only because of his exquisite sense of beauty, a sense which shows him intoxicating pleasures, but which at the same time implies and contains an equally exquisite sense of all deformities and all disproportion."

"All which is beautiful and noble is the result of reason and calculation."

"I consider it useless and tedious to represent what exists, because nothing that exists satisfies me. Nature is ugly, and I prefer the monsters of my fancy to what is positively trivial."

"Our religion is itself profoundly sad - a religion of universal anguish, and one which, because of its very catholicity, grants full liberty to the individual and asks no better than to be celebrated in each man's own language - so long as he knows anguish and is a painter."

"Modernity is the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, which make up one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immutable. This transitory fugitive element, which is constantly changing, must not be despised or neglected."

"God is the only being who, in order to reign, doesn't even need to exist."

"To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery."

"A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors."

"If the poet has pursued a moral objective, he has diminished his poetic force."

"We are all born marked for evil."

"It is from the womb of art that criticism was born."

"Genius is childhood recalled at will."

"I have more memories than if I were a thousand years old."

"The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be himself and others, as he wishes."

"Let us beware of common folk, of common sense, of sentiment, of inspiration, and of the obvious."

"The lover of life makes the whole world into his family, just as the lover of the fair sex creates his from all the lovely women he has found, from those that could be found, and those who are impossible to find."

"It is time to get drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of Time, get drunk; get drunk without stopping! On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish."

"Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself."

"Evil is done without effort, naturally, it is the working of fate; good is always the product of an art."

"But a dandy can never be a vulgar man."

"To say the word Romanticism is to say modern art - that is, intimacy, spirituality, color, aspiration towards the infinite, expressed by every means available to the arts."

"The pleasure we derive from the representation of the present is due, not only to the beauty it can be clothed in, but also to its essential quality of being the present."

"Whether you come from heaven or hell, what does it matter, O Beauty!"

"In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men."

"There are as many kinds of beauty as there are habitual ways of seeking happiness."

"It would be difficult for me not to conclude that the most perfect type of masculine beauty is Satan, as portrayed by Milton."

"For the merchant, even honesty is a financial speculation."