The only way to avoid being unhappy is to close yourself up in Art and to count for nothing all the rest.
For a long time now my heart has had its shutters closed, its steps deserted, formerly a tumultuous hotel, but now empty and echoing like a great empty tomb.
Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times. The ordinary person today lives better than a king did a century ago but is ungrateful!
COLD. Healthier than heat.
I have patience in all things – as far as the antechamber.
My kingdom is as wide as the universe and my wants have no limits. I go forward always, freeing spirits and weighing words, without fear, without compassion, without love, without God. I am called science.
The great natures which are good, are above everything generous and don’t begrudge the giving of themselves.
You’ll always have to deal with bastards, being lied to, deceived, slandered and ridiculed, but that’s to be expected and you must thank heaven when you meet the exception.
One never tires of what is well written, style is life! It is the very blood of thought!
Farming – a vocation accursed of heaven, since one never saw a millionaire involved in it.
I have come to have the firm conviction that vanity is the basis of everything, and finally that what one calls conscience is only inner vanity.
My life which I dream will be so beautiful, so poetic, so vast, so filled with love will turn out to be like everybody else’s – monotonous, sensible, stupid.
Thought is the greatest of pleasures – pleasure itself is only imagination – have you ever enjoyed anything more than your dreams?
I am a man-pen. I feel through the pen, because of the pen.
I hate that which we have decided to call realism, even though I have been made one of its high priests.
It seems to me that I have always existed and that I possess memories that date back to the Pharaohs.
Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry.
Reality does not conform to the ideal, but confirms it.
Sentences must stir in a book like leaves in a forest, each distinct from each despite their resemblance.
She would have liked not to be alive, or to be always asleep.