Free man, you will always cherish the sea! The sea is your mirror; you contemplate your soul In the infinite unrolling of its billows; Your mind is an abyss that is no less bitter.
Be wise, Oh my sadness, be calmer.
The one vice beyond redemption is to do bad things out of stupidity.
Art dulls the terror of the void better than anything else.
Samuel was, more than all the others, the man of failed works of beauty; – a fantastical and sickly creature, whose poetry shines forth much more in his person than in his works, and who, around one o’clock in the morning, between the dazzling of a coal fire and the clock’s tick-tock, always seemed to be the god of impotence, – a modern and hermaphrodite god, – so colossal an impotence, so enormous, reaching epic proportions!
The poet resembles this prince of cloud and sky Who frequents the tempest and laughs at the bowman; When exiled on the earth, the butt of hoots and jeers, His giant wings prevent him from walking.
Car je cherche le vide, el le noir, el le nu!
THE CAT Come, superb cat, to my amorous heart; Hold back the talons of your paws, Let me gaze into your beautiful eyes Of metal and agate. When my fingers leisurely caress you, Your head and your elastic back, And when my hand tingles with the pleasure Of feeling your electric body, In spirit I see my woman. Her gaze Like your own, amiable beast, Profound and cold, cuts and cleaves like a dart, And, from her head down to her feet, A subtle air, a dangerous perfume Floats about her dusky body.
Nature can counsel nothing but crime.
I love to think of those naked epochs Whose statues Phoebus liked to tinge with gold. At that time men and women, lithe and strong, Tasted the thrill of love free from care and prudery, And with the amorous sun caressing their loins They gloried in the health of their noble bodies.
I am the wound and the blade, the torturer and the flayed.
Multitude, solitude: identical terms, and interchangeable by the active and fertile poet. The man who is unable to people his solitude is equally unable to be alone in a bustling crowd.
Race of Cain, ascend to heaven, And cast God down upon the earth!
Seek my heart no longer; the beasts have eaten it.
L’art est long, et le temps est court.
Now is the time to get drunk! To stop being the martyred slaves of time, to get absolutely drunk – on wine, poetry, or on virtue, as you please.
Che belli i soli nelle calde sere!
For I desire the dark, the naked, and the lone.
Genius is merely childhood recollected at will.
The most prostituted being, the Being par excellence, is God, since He is the supreme friend to every individual; since He is the common, inexhaustible reservoir of love.