Have you sunk into so deep a stupor that you are happy only in your unhappiness?-
Folly, error, sin, avariceOccupy our minds and labor our bodies,And we feed our pleasant remorseAs beggars nourish their vermin.
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.
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.
It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.
Who would dare assign to art the sterile function of imitating nature?
Woe betide the manwho goes to antiquity for the study of anything other than ideal art, logic and general method! Byimmersing, himself too deeply in it, he will no longer have the present in his mind’...
One man illumines you with his other sets in you his sorrow.
L'HorlogeHorloge! dieu sinistre, effrayant, impassible,Dont le doigt nous menace et nous dit: Souviens-toi!Les vibrantes Douleurs dans ton coeur plein d'effroiSe planteront bientôt comme dans une cibl...
Il était tard; ainsi qu'une médaille neuveLa pleine lune s'étalait,Et la solennité de la nuit, comme un fleuveSur Paris dormant ruisselait.
Do you come from Heaven or rise from the abyss, Beauty?
Abolishers of the soul (materialists) are necessarily abolishers of hell, they, certainly, are interested. At all events, they are people who fear to live again--lazy people.
Time is an avid gambler who has no need to cheat to win every time.
What is irritating about love is that it is a crime that requires an accomplice.
A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors.
And, drunk with my own madness, I shouted at him furiously, "Make life beautiful! Make life beautiful!
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.
Minutes, foolish mortal, are the base mineralthat you must not let go of without extracting their gold!
Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and calculation.
It is by universal misunderstanding that all agree. For if, by ill luck, people understood each other, they would never agree.