God is only a word dreamed up to explain the world.
Everyone became brave from excess of terror.
Axiome: la haine du bourgeois est le commencement de la vertu. Axiom: Hatred of the bourgeois is the beginning of wisdom.
For every bourgeois, in the heat of youth, if only for a day, for a minute, has believed himself capable of immense passions, of heroic enterprises. The most mediocre libertine has dreamed of oriental princesses; every rotary carries about inside him the debris of a poet.
Talent is a long patience, and originality an effort of will and intense observation.
As words have an effective power of their own, curses reported against someone might turn against the speaker.
We should not touch our idols: their gilding will remain on our hands.
The more you approach infinity, the deeper you penetrate terror.
By dint of railing at idiots, one runs the risk of becoming an idiot oneself.
By working one can bend fortune. She is fond of crafty men.
A rich woman seems to have all her banknotes about her, guarding her virtue, like a cuirass, in the lining of her corset.
When you reduce a woman to writing, she makes you think of a thousand other women.
Caught up in life, you see it badly. You suffer from it or enjoy it too much. The artist, in my opinion, is a monstrosity, something outside of nature.
The true poet for me is a priest. As soon as he dons the cassock, he must leave his family.
I love my work with a frenetic and perverse love, as an ascetic loves the hair shirt which scratches his belly.
Stupidity is an immovable object: you can’t try to attack it wiithout being broken by it.
Put all your rage and madness into your work and live as orderly a life as possible.
One arrives at style only with atrocious effort, with fanatical and devoted stubbornness.
I love good sense above all, perhaps because I have none.
Here is true immorality: ignorance and stupidity; the devil is nothing but this. His name is Legion.