"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."

"Tell me, enigmatical man, whom do you love best, your father,Your mother, your sister, or your brother?I have neither father, nor mother, nor sister, nor brother.Your friends?Now you use a word whose meaning I have never known.Your country?I do not know in what latitude it lies.Beauty?I could indeed love her, Goddess and Immortal.Gold?I hate it as you hate God.Then, what do you love, extraordinary stranger?I love the clouds the clouds that pass up thereUp there the wonderful clouds!"

"He who looks through an open window sees fewer things than he who looks through a closed window."

"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."

"Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recaptured at will."

"I have felt the wind on the wing of madness."

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

"One should always be drunk. That's all that matters...But with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you chose. But get drunk."

"Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man's physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed."

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

"What is irritating about love is that it is a crime that requires an accomplice."

"Inspiration comes of working every day."

"The old Paris is no more (the form of a city changes faster, alas! than a mortal's heart)."

"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."

"What strange phenomena we find in a great city, all we need do is stroll about with our eyes open. Life swarms with innocent monsters."

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

"To fornicate is to aspire to enter into another, the artist never emerges from himself."

"How many years of fatigue and punishment it takes to learn the simple truth that work that disagreeable thing is the only way of not suffering in life or at all events of suffering less."

"Looking from outside into an open window one never sees as much as when one looks through a closed window. There is nothing more profound, more mysterious, more pregnant, more insidious, more dazzling than a window lighted by a single candle. What one can see out in the sunlight is always less interesting than what goes on behind a windowpane. In that black or luminous square life lives, life dreams, life suffers."

"Ant swarming CityCity full of dreamsWhere in broad day the specter tugs your sleeve."

"There are women who inspire you with the desire to conquer them and to take your pleasure of them, but this one fills you only with the desire to die slowly beneath her gaze."

"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."

"I walk alone, absorbed in my fantastic play, - Fencing with rhymes, which, parrying nimbly, back away; Tripping on words, as on rough paving in the street, Or bumping into verses I long had dreamed to meet."

"Once someone asked, when I was present, what constituted the greatest pleasure in love. Someone replied, naturally: in receiving. Another: in giving. Someone said: the pleasure of pride! someone else: the ecstasy of humility! All these muckers making like the Imitation of Christ. Finally, an impudent utopian was found who insisted that the greatest pleasure of love was in forming new citizens for the fatherland. Me, I said: what is uniquely, supremely voluptuous about love lies in the certainty of doing evil."

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

"The habit of doing one's duty drives away fear."

"Sexuality is the lyricism of the masses."

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

"Thanks be to God, Who gives us sufferingas sacred remedy for all our sins,that best and purest essence which preparesthe strong in spirit for divine delights!"

"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."

"In putting off what one has to do one runs the risk of never being able to do it."

"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."

"I set out to discover the why of it, and to transform my pleasure into knowledge."

"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."

"Nature is a word, an allegory, a mold, an embossing, if you will."

"Relate comic things in pompous fashion. Irregularity, in other words the unexpected, the surprising, the astonishing, are essential to and characteristic of beauty. Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony. The blend of the grotesque and the tragic are attractive to the mind, as is discord to blasé ears. Imagine a canvas for a lyrical, magical farce, for a pantomime, and translate it into a serious novel. Drown the whole thing in an abnormal, dreamy atmosphere, in the atmosphere of great days, the region of pure poetry."

"To be away from home and yet find oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet remain hidden from the world."

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

"I sit in the sky like a sphinx misunderstood; My heart of snow is wed to the whiteness of swans; I hate the movement that displaces the rigid lines, With lips untaught neither tears nor laughter do I know."

"Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony."