To be wicked is never excusable, but there is some merit in knowing that you are; the most irreparable of vices is to do evil from stupidity.
Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.
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 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.
It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.
The Devil pulls the strings which make us dance;We find delight in the most loathsome things;
As a small child, I felt in my heart two contradictory feelings, the horror of life and the ecstasy of life.
A multitude of small delights constitute happiness.
He possessed the logic of all good intentions and a knowledge of all the tricks of his trade, and yet he never succeeded at anything, because he believed too much in the impossible. Surprising? Why so...
One should always be drunk. That's all that matters...But with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you chose. But get drunk.
Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man's physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of exp...
Il me semble que je serais toujours bien la ou je ne suis pas.It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not.
Looking from outside into an open window one never sees as much as when one looks through a closed window. There is nothing more profound, more mysterious, more pregnant, more insidious, more dazzling...
There are as many kinds of beauty as there are habitual ways of seeking happiness.
Or poking through a house, in closets shut for years,Full of the scent of time - acrid, musky, dank,One comes, perhaps, upon a flask of memoriesIn whose escaping scent a soul returns to life.-
My love, do you recall the object which we saw,That fair, sweet, summer morn!At a turn in the path a foul carcassOn a gravel strewn bed,Its legs raised in the air, like a lustful woman,Burning and dri...
The Beautiful is always strange.
Music fathoms the sky.
The pleasure we derive from the representation of the present is due, not only to the beauty it can be clothed in, but also to its essential quality of being the present.
Whether you come from heaven or hell, what does it matter, O Beauty!