Who would dare assign to art the sterile function of imitating nature?
To be a great man and a saint for oneself, that is the only important thing.
The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries with terror before being defeated.
The priest is an immense being because he makes the crowd believe astonishing things.
The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be himself and others, as he wishes.
Sexuality is the lyricism of the masses.
It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.
What is exhilarating in bad taste is the aristocratic pleasure of giving offense.
In our corruption we perceive beauties unrevealed to ancient times.
The immense appetite we have for biography comes from a deep-seated sense of equality.
You walk on corpses, beauty, undismayed.
We are all born marked for evil.
Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.
Nearly all our originality comes from the stamp that time impresses upon our sensibility.
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.
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.
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.
Progress, this great heresy of decay.
It is by universal misunderstanding that all agree. For if, by ill luck, people understood each other, they would never agree.
Within the bottle’s depths, the wine’s soul sang one night. Drink wine, drink poetry, drink virtue.