The man is placed where the Earth ends, the woman, where the heaven starts.
It is only barbarous nations who have a sudden growth after a victory.
For true poetry, complete poetry, consists in the harmony of contraries. Hence, it is time to say aloud – and it is here above allthat exceptions prove the rule – that everything that exists in nature exists in art.
Poetry contains philosophy as the soul contains reason.
I refuse the oration of all churches. I ask a prayer of all souls. I believe in God.
Woman, nude, is the blue sky. Clouds and garments are an obstacle to contemplation. Beauty and infinity would be gazed upon unveiled.
God secludes Himself; but the thinker listens at the door.
The aim of art is almost divine: to bring to life again if it is writing history, to create if it is writing poetry.
Everything being a constant carnival, there is no carnival left.
Genius is a promontory jutting out into the infinite.
I put a Phrygian cap on the old dictionary.
O youth! thou often tearest thy wings against the thorns of voluptuousness.
There are no trifles in the human story, no trifling leaves on the tree.
Work is the law of life, and to reject it as boredom is to submit to it as torment.
Everything Changes. The only thing that remains immovable across the centuries and fixes the character of a people is cooking.
The real, native South Seas food is lousy. You can’t eat it.
In the opera we call love, the libretto is almost nothing.
Close by the Rights of Man, at the least set beside them, are the Rights of the Spirit.
But when ill indeed, Even dismissing the doctor don’t always succeed.
Strange to say, the luminous world is the invisible world; the luminous world is that which we do not see. Our eyes of flesh see only night.