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.
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.
My heart is lost; the beasts have eaten it.
It’s the devil who pulls the strings that make us dance.
I sit in the sky like a sphinx misunderstood; My heart of snow is wed to the whiteness of swans; I hate the movement that displaces the rigid lines, With lips untaught neither tears nor laughter do I know.
Passion I hate, and spirit does me wrong. Let us love gently.
An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom.
Even when she walks one would believe that she dances.
One can only forget about time by making use of it.
The form of a town changes more swiftly alas! Than the heart of a mortal.
To be just, that is to say, to justify its existence, criticism should be partial, passionate and political, that is to say, written from an exclusive point of view, but a point of view that opens up the widest horizons.
In this horror of solitude, this need to lose his ego in exterior flesh, which man calls grandly the need for love.
It is unfortunately very true that, without leisure and money, love can be no more than an orgy of the common man. Instead of being a sudden impulse full of ardor and reverie, it becomes a distastefully utilitarian affair.
The habit of doing one’s duty drives away fear.
Like those great sphinxes lounging through eternity in noble attitudes upon the desert sand, they gaze incuriously at nothing, calm and wise.
Finer than any sand are dusts of gold that gleam, Vague starpoints, in the mystic iris of their eyes.
In my mind it strolls, as well as in my apartment. A cat, strong, sweet and delightful...
What is art? Prostitution.