"There is no dream of love, however ideal it may be, which does not end up with a fat, greedy baby hanging from the breast."

"Hypocrite reader my fellow my brother!"

"Any newspaper, from the first line to the last, is nothing but a web of horrors, I cannot understand how an innocent hand can touch a newspaper without convulsing in disgust."

"The unique and supreme voluptuousness of love lies in the certainty of committing evil. And men and women know from birth that in evil is found all sensual delight."

"Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry."

"Nature is a temple in which living columns sometimes emit confused words. Man approaches it through forests of symbols, which observe him with familiar glances."

"France is not poetic; she even feels, in fact, a congenital horror of poetry. Among the writers who use verse, those whom she will always prefer are the most prosaic."

"Progress, this great heresy of decay."

"Even if it were proven that God didn't exist, Religion would still be Saintly and Divine."

"In literature as in ethics, there is danger, as well as glory, in being subtle. Aristocracy isolates us."

"The insatiable thirst for everything which lies beyond, and which life reveals, is the most living proof of our immortality."

"Common sense tells us that the things of the earth exist only a little, and that true reality is only in dreams."

"Inspiration comes of working every day."

"Beauty is the sole ambition, the exclusive goal of Taste."

"It is necessary to work, if not from inclination, at least from despair. Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself."

"How little remains of the man I once was, save the memory of him! But remembering is only a new form of suffering."

"Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet upon the same road, one of them has to give place."

"Any man who does not accept the conditions of life sells his soul."

"Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable."

"Sexuality is the lyricism of the masses."

"To be a great man and a saint for oneself, that is the only important thing."

"Who would dare assign to art the sterile function of imitating nature?"

"The priest is an immense being because he makes the crowd believe astonishing things."

"It is the hour to be drunken! to escape being the martyred slaves of time, be ceaselessly drunk. On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish."

"The man who says his evening prayer is a captain posting his sentinels. He can sleep."

"I love Wagner, but the music I prefer is that of a cat hung up by its tail outside a window and trying to stick to the panes of glass with its claws."

"Evil is committed without effort, naturally, fatally; goodness is always the product of some art."

"Anybody, providing he knows how to be amusing, has the right to talk about himself."

"It is by universal misunderstanding that all agree. For if, by ill luck, people understood each other, they would never agree."

"I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no Melancholy."

"Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony."

"I am unable to understand how a man of honor could take a newspaper in his hands without a shudder of disgust."