The world only goes round by misunderstanding.
Evil is committed without effort, naturally, fatally; goodness is always the product of some art.
Music fathoms the sky.
Nations, like families, have great men only in spite of themselves.
I should like the fields tinged with red, the rivers yellow and the trees painted blue. Nature has no imagination.
However incoherent a human existence may be, human unity is not bothered by it.
There is a word, in a verb, something sacred which forbids us from using it recklessly. To handle a language cunningly is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.
I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no Melancholy.
The man who says his evening prayer is a captain posting his sentinels. He can sleep.
A man who drinks only water has a secret to hide from his fellow men.
Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject, nor exact truth, but in the way of feeling.
There is no sweeter pleasure than to surprise a man by giving him more than he hopes for.
A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.
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.
Even if it were proven that God didn’t exist, Religion would still be Saintly and Divine.
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.
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.
All fashions are charming, or rather relatively charming, each one being a new striving, more or less well conceived, after beauty, an approximate statement of an ideal, the desire for which constantly teases the unsatisfied human mind.
Life has but one true charm: the charm of the game. But what if we’re indifferent to whether we win or lose?
Drink wine, drink poetry, drink virtue.