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.
Only when we drink poison are we well.
He sadly resumes his path toward a desert that he knows is similar to the one he just crossed, escorted by the pale phantom they call Reason, who lights up the aridity of his path with a weak lantern, and who, when the thirst of passion comes back from time to time, quenches it with the poison of ennui.
Romanticism is a grace, celestial or infernal, that bestows us eternal stigmata.
He whose thoughts, like skylarks, Toward the morning sky take flight – Who hovers over life and understands with ease The language of flowers and silent things!
You can live three days without bread – without poetry, never; and those of you who can say the contrary are mistaken; they are out of their minds.
In this respect you, unworthy companion of my sad life, resemble the public, to whom one must never present the delicate scents that only exasperate them, but instead give them only dung, chosen with care.
In certain almost supernatural states of mind, the profundity of life is revealed in its entirety in the spectacle, common as it may be, that we have before our eyes. It becomes the symbol of it.
Conceive a canvas for a lyrical or fairytale buffoonery, for a pantomime, and translate it into a serious novel. Drown everything in an abnormal and dreamy atmosphere, – in the atmosphere of the great days. – It must be something soothing, – even serene in its passion. – Regions of pure Poetry.
A room like a dream, a room truly spiritual, whose stagnant atmosphere is lightly tinted with pink and blue. It’s a thing of the dusk, something bluish, pinkish; a sensual dream during an eclipse.
Dis-moi, ton coeur parfois s’envole-t-il, Agathe!
He is at once a great lazybones, pitifully ambitious, and famous for unhappiness; for his entire life he has had practically nothing but half-baked ideas. The sun of laziness, which ceaselessly glows within him, vaporizes him and gnaws away that half-genius that heaven bestowed upon him.
The mixture of the grotesque and the tragic is agreeable to the spirit, as are discords to the jaded ear.
I sing of calamitous dogs, those that wander among the winding ravines of great cities, or those whose sparkling, winning eyes have asked some misfit: “Take me with you, and our combined wretchedness might make some sort of happiness!
Nature is a temple in which living pillars Sometimes give voice to confused words;.
I join a heart of snow to the whiteness of swans; I hate movement for it displaces lines, And never do I weep and never do I laugh.
One man illumines you with his other sets in you his sorrow.
By a fatal law, a genius is always an idiot.
Oh foul magnificence, sublime disgrace.
You must be drunk always. That is everything: the only question. Not to feel the horrible burden of Time that crushes your shoulders and bends you earthward, you must be drunk without respite. But drunk on what? On wine, on poetry, on virtue – take your pick. But be drunk.