Always be a poet, even in prose.
Strangeness is a necessary ingredient in beauty.
This life is a hospital where every patient is possessed with the desire to change beds; one man would like to suffer in front of the stove, and another believes that he would recover his health beside the window.
A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors.
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.
A multitude of small delights constitute happiness.
The devil’s finest trick is to persuade you that he does not exist.
Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recaptured at will.
There are as many kinds of beauty as there are habitual ways of seeking happiness.
What can an eternity of damnation matter to someone who has felt, if only for a second, the infinity of delight?
Here comes the time when, vibrating on its stem, every flower fumes like a censer; noises and perfumes circle in the evening air.
True Civilization does not lie in gas, nor in steam, nor in turn-tables. It lies in the reduction of the traces of original sin.
The beautiful is always bizarre.
Even in the centuries which appear to us to be the most monstrous and foolish, the immortal appetite for beauty has always found satisfaction.
There are but three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the warrior and the poet. To know, to kill and to create. The rest of mankind may be taxed and drudged, they are born for the stable, that is to say, to practise what they call professions.
Extract the eternal from the ephemeral.
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.
Common sense tells us that the things of the earth exist only a little, and that true reality is only in dreams.
Remembering is only a new form of suffering.
Forest, I fear you! In my ruined heart your roaring wakens the same agony as in cathedrals when the organ moans and from the depths I hear that I am damned.