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

"There exist only three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill, to create."

"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."

"Oh, Creator! Can monsters exist in the sight of him who alone knows how they were invented, how they invented themselves, and how they might not have invented themselves?"

"Nature can counsel nothing but crime."

"With heart at rest I climbed the citadel'sSteep height, and saw the city as from a tower,Hospital, brothel, prison, and such hells,Where evil comes up softly like a flower.Thou knowest, O Satan, patron of my pain,Not for vain tears I went up at that hour;But like an old sad faithful lecher, fainTo drink delight of that enormous trullWhose hellish beauty makes me young again.Whether thou sleep, with heavy vapors full,Sodden with day, or, new appareled, standIn gold-laced veils of evening beautiful,I love thee, infamous city! Harlots andHunted have pleasures of their own to give,The vulgar herd can never understand."

"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 Beautiful is always strange."

"The world only goes round by misunderstanding."

"I have cultivated my hysteria with joy and terror."

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

"The beautiful is always bizarre."

"It is at despair at not being able to be noble and beautiful by natural means that we have made up our faces so strangely."

"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."

"The mainspring of genius is curiosity."

"Il me semble que je serais toujours bien la ou je ne suis pas.It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not."

"The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries out in terror before being vanquished."

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

"The saddest thing is that every love has an unhappy ending, and all the more unhappy in proportion to how divinely it began, with what wings it first took flight."

"A friend of mine, the most innocuous dreamer who ever lived, once set a forest on fire to see, as he said, if it would catch as easily as people said. The first ten times the experiment was a failure; but on the eleventh it succeeded all too well."

"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."

"Time is an avid gambler who has no need to cheat to win every time."

"And yetto wine, to opium even, I preferthe elixir of your lips on which love flaunts itself;and in the wasteland of desireyour eyes afford the wells to slake my thirst."

"The Devil pulls the strings which make us dance;We find delight in the most loathsome things;Some furtherance of Hell each new day brings,And yet we feel no horror in that rank advance."

"To be wicked is never excusable, but there is some merit in knowing that you are; the most irreparable of vices is to do evil from stupidity."

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

"L'Attitude du beau est un duel où l'artiste crie de frayeur avant d'être vaincu."

"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."

"If rape or arson, poison or the knifeHas wove no pleasing patterns in the stuffOf this drab canvas we accept as life -It is because we are not bold enough!"

"The mixture of the grotesque and the tragic is agreeable to the spirit, as are discords to the jaded ear."

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

"The devil's finest trick is to persuade you that he does not exist."

"Good sense tells us that earthly things are rare and fleeting, and that true reality exists only in dreams. To draw sustenance from happiness- natural or artificial - you must first have the courage to swallow it; and those who perhaps most merit happiness are precisely those on whom felicity, as mortals conceive it, always acts as a vomitive."

"A multitude of small delights constitute happiness."

"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."

"Isn't it true that a pleasant house makes winter more poetic, and doesn't winter add to the poetry of a house?"