The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries with terror before being defeated. It would perhaps be nice to be alternately the victim and the executioner. 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. There are as many kinds of beauty as there are habitual ways of seeking happiness. The insatiable thirst for everything which lies beyond, and which life reveals, is the most living proof of our immortality. What is art? Prostitution. Inspiration comes of working every day. There exist only three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill, to create.

Imagination is the queen of truth, and possibility is one of the regions of truth. She is positively akin to infinity. 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. Common sense tells us that the things of the earth exist only a little, and that true reality is only in dreams. Genius is childhood recalled at will. All which is beautiful and noble is the result of reason and calculation.

Each day we take another step to hell,
Descending through the stench, unhorrified. I have more memories than if I were a thousand years old. Extract the eternal from the ephemeral. Nothing can be done except little by little. I have felt the wind on the wing of madness.

If the poet has pursued a moral objective, he has diminished his poetic force. There are moments of existence when time and space are more profound, and the awareness of existence is immensely heightened. 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. We revel in the laxness of the path we take. Passion I hate, and spirit does me wrong. Let us love gently.

Whether you come from heaven or hell, what does it matter, O Beauty! 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. It's the devil who pulls the strings that make us dance. 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. I should like the fields tinged with red, the rivers yellow and the trees painted blue. Nature has no imagination.

For each letter received from a creditor, write fifty lines on an extraterrestrial subject and you will be saved. 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. A soul is a thing so impalpable, so often useless and sometimes such a nuisance, that the loss of it disturbed me less than if I had lost my visiting card while taking a walk. Music fathoms the sky. For the merchant, even honesty is a financial speculation.

Life has but one true charm: the charm of the game. But what if we’re indifferent to whether we win or lose? 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. 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. What is exhilarating in bad taste is the aristocratic pleasure of giving offense. There is no such thing as a long piece of work, except one that you dare not start.

Sexuality is the lyricism of the masses. To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery. It is from the womb of art that criticism was born. Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony. I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no Melancholy.

Nearly all our originality comes from the stamp that time impresses upon our sensibility. But a dandy can never be a vulgar man. Always be a poet, even in prose. 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. Life is a hospital in which every patient is possessed by the desire of changing his bed. One would prefer to suffer near the fire, and another is certain he would get well if he were by the window.

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. Who would dare assign to art the sterile function of imitating nature? Beauty is the sole ambition, the exclusive goal of Taste. 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. Those men get along best with women who can get along best without them.

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. It is necessary to work, if not from inclination, at least from despair. Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself. Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry. 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. There is no more steely barb than that of the Infinite.

The man who says his evening prayer is a captain posting his sentinels. He can sleep. Even in the centuries which appear to us to be the most monstrous and foolish, the immortal appetite for beauty has always found satisfaction. We are all born marked for evil. Any man who does not accept the conditions of life sells his soul. The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be himself and others, as he wishes.

A multitude of small delights constitute happiness. Nations, like families, have great men only in spite of themselves. A sweetheart is a bottle of wine, a wife is a wine bottle. 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. 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.

God is the only being who, in order to reign, doesn't even need to exist. It is by universal misunderstanding that all agree. For if, by ill luck, people understood each other, they would never agree. A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else. As a small child, I felt in my heart two contradictory feelings, the horror of life and the ecstasy of life. 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.

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. Even if it were proven that God didn't exist, Religion would still be Saintly and Divine. Through the Unknown, we'll find the New Evil is committed without effort, naturally, fatally; goodness is always the product of some art. Let us beware of common folk, of common sense, of sentiment, of inspiration, and of the obvious.

How little remains of the man I once was, save the memory of him! But remembering is only a new form of suffering. 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. The world only goes round by misunderstanding.