"Anybody, providing he knows how to be amusing, has the right to talk about himself"
"An artist is an artist only because of his exquisite sense of beauty, a sense which shows him intoxicating pleasures, but which at the same time implies and contains an equally exquisite sense of all deformities and all disproportion"
"A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors"
"There exist only three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill, to create"
"Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet upon the same road, one of them has to give place"
"It is the hour to be drunken! to escape being the martyred slaves of time, be ceaselessly drunk. On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish"
"I love Wagner, but the music I prefer is that of a cat hung up by its tail outside a window and trying to stick to the panes of glass with its claws"
"Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and calculation"
"Everything for me becomes allegory"
"Even in the centuries which appear to us to be the most monstrous and foolish, the immortal appetite for beauty has always found satisfaction"
"Even if it were proven that God didn't exist, Religion would still be Saintly and Divine"
"Whether you come from heaven or hell, what does it matter, O Beauty!"
"Our religion is itself profoundly sad - a religion of universal anguish, and one which, because of its very catholicity, grants full liberty to the individual and asks no better than to be celebrated in each man's own language - so long as he knows anguish and is a painter"
"Nothing can be done except little by little"
"Nature... is nothing but the inner voice of self-interest"
"It would perhaps be nice to be alternately the victim and the executioner"
"I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no Melancholy"
"France is not poetic; she even feels, in fact, a congenital horror of poetry. Among the writers who use verse, those whom she will always prefer are the most prosaic"
"Any man who does not accept the conditions of life sells his soul"
"The unique and supreme voluptuousness of love lies in the certainty of committing evil. And men and women know from birth that in evil is found all sensual delight"
"The lover of life makes the whole world into his family, just as the lover of the fair sex creates his from all the lovely women he has found, from those that could be found, and those who are impossible to find"
"Always be a poet, even in prose"
"What is exhilarating in bad taste is the aristocratic pleasure of giving offense"
"To say the word Romanticism is to say modern art - that is, intimacy, spirituality, color, aspiration towards the infinite, expressed by every means available to the arts"
"The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be himself and others, as he wishes"
