I have to confess that I had gambled on my soul and lost it with heroic insouciance and lightness of touch. The soul is so impalpable, so often useless, and sometimes such a nuisance, that I felt no more emotion on losing it than if, on a stroll, I had mislaid my visiting card.
That in all times, mediocrity has dominated, that is indubitable; but that it reigns more than ever, that it is becoming absolutely triumphant and inhibiting, this is what is as true as it is distressing.
In certain almost supernatural states of the soul, the profundity of life reveals itself entirely in the spectacle, however ordinary it may be, before one's eyes. It becomes its symbol.
Hypocrite reader my fellow my brother!
Being a useful man has always seemed to me to be something truly hideous.
In literature as in ethics, there is danger, as well as glory, in being subtle. Aristocracy isolates us.
Amer savoir, celui qu'on tire du voyage! Bitter is the knowledge gained in travelling.
Delacroix was passionately in love with passion, but coldly determined to express passion as clearly as possible.
I lived for a long time under vast porticos That maritime suns tinted with a thousand fires, And whose great pillars, straight and majestuous In the evening made seem like basaltic caves.
La volupte unique et supre" me de l'amour g|"t dans la certitude de faire le mal. The unique, supreme pleasure of love consists in the certainty of doing evil.
Unable to do away with love, the Church found a way to decontaminate it by creating marriage.
And over your unconsecrated head you'll hear the howling wolves lament their fate and yours the livelong year.
Alas! Man's vices, horrible as they are supposed to be, contain the positive proof of his taste for the infinite.
To glorify the cult of images (my great, my only, my earliest passion).
We all have the republican spirit in our veins, like syphilis in our bones. We are democratized and venerealized.
A friend of mine, the most innocuous dreamer who ever lived, once set a forest on fire to see, as he said, if it would catch as easily as people said. The first ten times the experiment was a failure; but on the eleventh it succeeded all too well.
...an industry which can furnish results identical to nature must be the absolute in art.
Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony.
You walk on corpses, beauty, undismayed.
La, tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté Luxe, calme et volupté There, there is nothing else but grace and measure, Richness, quietness, and pleasure.
Etre un homme utile m'a paru toujours quelque chose de bien hideux. To be useful has always seemed to me quite hideous.
Laments of an Icarus The paramours of courtesans Are well and satisfied, content. But as for me my limbs are rent Because I clasped the clouds as mine. I owe it to the peerless stars Which flame in the remotest sky That I see only with spent eyes Remembered suns I knew before. In vain I had at heart to find The center and the end of space. Beneath some burning, unknown gaze I feel my very wings unpinned And, burned because I beauty loved, I shall not know the highest bliss, And give my name to the abyss Which waits to claim me as its own.
France at the dinner table in faraway places; but here, among ourselves, in the family, let us face the facts: France is not poetic; to tell the truth, she even feels a congenital horror of poetry. Among the writers who use verse, those whom she will always prefer are the most prosaic.
Who among us has not dreamt, in moments of ambition, of the miracle of a poetic prose, musical without rhythm and rhyme, supple and staccato enough to adapt to the lyrical stirrings of the soul, the undulations of dreams, and sudden leaps of consciousness.
In order not to feel time's horrid fardel bruise your shoulders, grinding you into the earth, get drunk and stay that way. On what? On wine, poetry, virtue, whatever. But get drunk!
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