There are in every man, always, two simultaneous allegiances, one to God, the other to Satan. Invocation of God, or Spirituality, is a desire to climb higher; that of Satan, or animality, is delight in descent.
He who looks through an open window sees fewer things than he who looks through a closed window.
Woman is natural, that is to say, abominable.
The cannon thunders... limbs fly in all directions... one can hear the groans of victims and the howling of those performing the sacrifice... it's Humanity in search of happiness.
If the word doesn't exist, invent it; but first be sure it doesn't exist.
From his soft fur, golden and brown, Goes out so sweet a scent, one night I might have been embalmed in it By giving him one little pet. He is my household's guardian soul; He judges, he presides, inspires All matters in his royal realm; Might he be fairy? or a god? When my eyes, to this cat I love Drawn as by a magnet's force, Turn tamely back upon that appeal, And when I look within myself, I notice with astonishment The fire of his opal eyes, Clear beacons glowing, living jewels, Taking my measure, steadily.
I have cultivated my hysteria with delight and terror. Now I suffer continually from vertigo, and today, 23rd of January, 1862, I have received a singular warning, I have felt the wind of the wing of madness pass over me.
It is at once by way of poetry and through poetry, as with music, that the soul glimpses splendors from beyond the tomb; and when an exquisite poem brings one's eyes to the point of tears, those tears are not evidence of an excess of joy, they are witness far more to an exacerbated melancholy, a disposition of the nerves, a nature exiled among imperfect things, which would like to possess, without delay, a paradise revealed on this very same earth.
Evil is done without effort, naturally, it's destiny; good is always the product of skill.
Nations, like families, have great men only in spite of themselves. They do everything in their power not to have any. And therefore, the great man, in order to exist, must possess a force of attack which is greater than the force of resistance developed by millions of people.
I set out to discover the why of it, and to transform my pleasure into knowledge.
The act of love strongly resembles torture or surgery.
Torture, as the art of discovering the truth, is barbaric nonsense; it is the application of a material means to a spiritual end.
To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.
Modernity is the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, which make up one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immutable. This transitory fugitive element, which is constantly changing, must not be despised or neglected.
Dancing is poetry with arms and legs.
Go then, a starveling girl With no perfume or pearls, Only your nudity O my beauty!
The son will run away from the family not at eighteen but at twelve, emancipated by his gluttonous precocity; he will fly not to seek heroic adventures, not to deliver a beautiful prisoner from a tower, not to immortalize a garret with sublime thoughts, but to found a business, to enrich himself and to compete with his infamous papa.
The Devil pulls the strings which make us dance; We find delight in the most loathsome things; Some furtherance of Hell each new day brings, And yet we feel no horror in that rank advance.
Color... thinks by itself, independently of the object it clothes.
Passion I hate, and spirit does me wrong. Let us love gently.
There exist only three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill, to create.
We revel in the laxness of the path we take.
The more delicate and ambitious the soul, the further do dreams estrange it from possible things.
I have more memories than if I were a thousand years old.
Follow AzQuotes on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Every day we present the best quotes! Improve yourself, find your inspiration, share with friends
or simply: