On the day when a young writer corrects his first proof-sheet he is as proud as a schoolboy who has just got his first dose of pox.
The Devil pulls the strings which make us dance; We find delight in the most loathsome things; Some furtherance of Hell each new day brings, And yet we feel no horror in that rank advance.
But a dandy can never be a vulgar man.
Hashish will be, indeed, for the impressions and familiar thoughts of the man, a mirror which magnifies, yet no more than a mirror.
I have cultivated my hysteria with delight and terror. Now I suffer continually from vertigo, and today, 23rd of January, 1862, I have received a singular warning, I have felt the wind of the wing of madness pass over me.
My dear brothers, never forget, when you hear the progress of enlightenment vaunted, that the devil’s best trick is to persuade you that he doesn’t exist!
What I say is that the supreme and singular joy of making love resides in the certainty of doing evil.
A precious liquid, a poison dearer than that of the Borgias – because it is made from our blood, our health, our sleep, and two-thirds of our love – we must be stingy with it.
The will to work must dominate, for art is long and time is brief.
Imagination is an almost divine faculty which, without recourse to any philosophical method, immediately perceives everything: the secret and intimate connections between things, correspondences and analogies.
Art is an infinitely precious good, a draught both refreshing and cheering which restores the stomach and the mind to the natural equilibrium of the ideal.
Today I felt pass over me A breath of wind from the wings of madness.
It is the greatest art of the devil to convince us he does not exist.
Genius is nothing more or less than childhood recovered by will, a childhood how equipped for self-expression with an adult’s capacities.
What do I care if you are good? Be beautiful! and be sad!
Whether you come from heaven or hell, what does it matter, O Beauty!
The artist is today and has been for many years, despite his absence of merit, simply a spoiled child. So many honors, so much money bestowed on men without souls and without education.
In philosophical inquiry, the human spirit, imitating the movement of the stars, must follow a curve which brings it back to its point of departure. To conclude is to close a circle.
Where one should see only what is beautiful, our public looks only for what is true.
For me, Romanticism is the most recent and the most current expression of beauty.