Nothing in a portrait is a matter of indifference. Gesture, grimace, clothing, decor even – all must combine to realize a character.
There is a certain cowardice, a certain weakness, rather, among respectable folk. Only brigands are convinced-of what? That they must succeed. And so they do succeed.
Man loves man so much that when he flees the city, it is still to seek the crowd, that is, to rebuild the city in the country.
Il faut e pater le bourgeois. One must astound the bourgeois.
The solitary and thoughtful stroller finds a singular intoxication in this universal communion. The man who loves to lose himself in a crowd enjoys feverish delights that the egoist locked up in himself as in a box, and the slothful man like a mollusk in his shell, will be eternally deprived of. He adopts as his own all the occupations, all the joys and all the sorrows that chance offers.
Looking from outside into an open window one never sees as much as when one looks through a closed window. There is nothing more profound, more mysterious, more pregnant, more insidious, more dazzling than a window lighted by a single candle. What one can see out in the sunlight is always less interesting than what goes on behind a windowpane. In that black or luminous square life lives, life dreams, life suffers.
To be wicked is never excusable, but there is some merit in knowing that you are; the most irreparable of vices is to do evil from stupidity.
Isn’t it true that a pleasant house makes winter more poetic, and doesn’t winter add to the poetry of a house?
These beings have no other status, but that of cultivating the idea of beauty in their own persons, of satisfying their passions, of feeling and thinking... Contrary to what many thoughtless people seem to believe, dandyism is not even an excessive delight in clothes and material elegance. For the perfect dandy, these things are no more than the symbol of the aristocratic superiority of his mind.
There is an invincible taste for prostitution in the heart of man, from which comes his horror of solitude. He wants to be ‘two’. The man of genius wants to be ‘one’... It is this horror of solitude, the need to lose oneself in the external flesh, that man nobly calls ‘the need to love’.
The saddest thing is that every love has an unhappy ending, and all the more unhappy in proportion to how divinely it began, with what wings it first took flight.
Do not look for my heart any more; the beasts have eaten it.
How difficult it is to understand each other, my dear angel, and how much thought is incommunicable, even between people who love each other!
To be away from home and yet find oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet remain hidden from the world.
God is a scandal, – a profitable scandal.
Le beau est toujours bizarre.
So you see how difficult it is to understand one another, my dear angel, how incommunicable thought is, even between two people in love.
The mainspring of genius is curiosity.
Do you come from Heaven or rise from the abyss, Beauty?
I ask every thinking man to show me what remains of life.