Who would dare assign to art the sterile function of imitating nature?

Nature is a temple in which living columns sometimes emit confused words. Man approaches it through forests of symbols, which observe him with familiar glances.

There is no such thing as a long piece of work, except one that you dare not start.

A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.

As a small child, I felt in my heart two contradictory feelings, the horror of life and the ecstasy of life.

To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.

This life is a hospital in which every patient is possessed with a desire to change his bed.

Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry.

Progress, this great heresy of decay.

There exist only three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill, to create.

We are weighed down, every moment, by the conception and the sensation of Time. And there are but two means of escaping and forgetting this nightmare: pleasure and work. Pleasure consumes us. Work strengthens us. Let us choose.

I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no Melancholy.

It is time to get drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of Time, get drunk; get drunk without stopping! On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.

Hypocrite reader my fellow my brother!

Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and calculation.

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.

In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men.

A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors.

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.

It is necessary to work, if not from inclination, at least from despair. Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.

Even if it were proven that God didn't exist, Religion would still be Saintly and Divine.

But a dandy can never be a vulgar man.

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.

What is art? Prostitution.

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.

To be a great man and a saint for oneself, that is the only important thing.

Nothing can be done except little by little.

I have cultivated my hysteria with pleasure and terror.

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.

There are as many kinds of beauty as there are habitual ways of seeking happiness.

A sweetheart is a bottle of wine, a wife is a wine bottle.

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.

Everything for me becomes allegory.

In literature as in ethics, there is danger, as well as glory, in being subtle. Aristocracy isolates us.

Nature... is nothing but the inner voice of self-interest.

I consider it useless and tedious to represent what exists, because nothing that exists satisfies me. Nature is ugly, and I prefer the monsters of my fancy to what is positively trivial.

God is the only being who, in order to reign, doesn't even need to exist.

It would be difficult for me not to conclude that the most perfect type of masculine beauty is Satan, as portrayed by Milton.

Evil is done without effort, naturally, it is the working of fate; good is always the product of an art.

We are all born marked for evil.

What is exhilarating in bad taste is the aristocratic pleasure of giving offense.

To the solemn graves, near a lonely cemetery, my heart like a muffled drum is beating funeral marches.

Let us beware of common folk, of common sense, of sentiment, of inspiration, and of the obvious.

Those men get along best with women who can get along best without them.

The man who says his evening prayer is a captain posting his sentinels. He can sleep.

Sexuality is the lyricism of the masses.

Any man who does not accept the conditions of life sells his soul.

There is no dream of love, however ideal it may be, which does not end up with a fat, greedy baby hanging from the breast.

Whether you come from heaven or hell, what does it matter, O Beauty!