The taste for pleasure attaches us to the present. The concern with our salvation leaves us hanging on the future.
Seek my heart no longer; the beasts have eaten it.
L’art est long, et le temps est court.
Now is the time to get drunk! To stop being the martyred slaves of time, to get absolutely drunk – on wine, poetry, or on virtue, as you please.
Che belli i soli nelle calde sere!
For I desire the dark, the naked, and the lone.
Genius is merely childhood recollected at will.
The most prostituted being, the Being par excellence, is God, since He is the supreme friend to every individual; since He is the common, inexhaustible reservoir of love.
Take it easy, Sadness. Settle down.
Beauty, you walk on corpses, mocking them;.
A langorous island, where Nature abounds With exotic trees and luscious fruit; And with men whose bodies are slim and astute, And with women whose frankness delights and astounds.
The artist, the true artist, the true poet, should paint only in accordance with what he sees or feels. He must be really faithful to his own nature. He must avoid, like death itself, the temptation of borrowing the eyes or feelings of another man, however great, for in that case the production he gave us would be a pack of lies, relatively to himself, not realities.
The mental Heaven’s inaccessible blue, For wearied mortals that still dream and mourn, Expands and sinks; towards the chasm drawn.
My heart is a palace pillaged by the herd; They kill and take each other by the throat!
Her tint, pale and warm – this bewitching bride, Displays a nobly nurtured mien, Courageous and grand like a huntsman, her stride; A tranquil smile and eyes serene.
The man allured by a passing face, For ever bears the chastisement Of having wished to change his place.
The Sky; that black lid of a mighty pot, Where, vast and minute, human Races boil.
There lay but the sweetness that charms, and the joy that destroys.
O pallid seasons, mistress of our climes.
Poor sisters – yea, I love you as I pity you, For your unsatiated thirsts and anguished sighs, And for the vials of love within your hearts so true.
Thy laughter soaked in tears which no one sees.