The denigration of those we love always detaches us from them in some degree. Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fingers.
One mustn’t look at the abyss, because there is at the bottom an inexpressible charm which attracts us.
Years passed; and he endured the idleness of his intelligence and the inertia of his heart.
Style is as much under the words as in the words. It is as much the soul as it is the flesh of a work.
Woman is a vulgar animal from whom man has created an excessively beautiful ideal.
What seems beautiful to me, what I should like to write, is a book about nothing, a book dependent on nothing external, which would be held together by the strength of its style, just as the earth, suspended in the void, depends on nothing external for its support.
Mediocrity cherishes rules; as for me, I hate them; I feel for them and for every restriction, corporation, caste, hierarchy, level, herd, a loathing which fills my soul, and it is in this respect perhaps that I understand martyrdom.
Sick, irritated, and the prey to a thousand discomforts, I go on with my labor like a true workingman, who, with sleeves rolled up, in the sweat of his brow, beats away at his anvil, not caring whether it rains or blows, hails or thunders.
One must laugh and weep, love, work, enjoy and suffer, in short vibrate as much as possible in all his being.
Reveal art; conceal the artist.
Snicker on hearing his name: ‘the gentleman who thinks we are descended from the apes.’
What is the beautiful, if not the impossible.
After a person dies, there is always something like a feeling of stupefaction, so difficult is it to comprehend this unexpected advent of nothingness and to resign oneself to believing it.
Be orderly and disciplined in daily life, like a good bourgeois, so that I might be wild and violent in my art.
Speech is a rolling press that always amplifies one’s emotions.
The morality of art is in its very beauty.
What an elder sees sitting; the young can’t see standing.
But some day sooner or later our passion would have cooled – inevitably – it’s the way with everything human.
One’s existence should be in two parts: one should live like a bourgeois and think like a demigod.
We have all been beaten! Each one has to bear his misfortune! Resign yourself!