For the merchant, even honesty is a financial speculation.

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.

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

Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.

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

It is by universal misunderstanding that all agree. For if, by ill luck, people understood each other, they would never agree.

An artist is an artist only because of his exquisite sense of beauty, a sense which shows him intoxicating pleasures, but which at the same time implies and contains an equally exquisite sense of all deformities and all disproportion.

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

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.

Beauty is the sole ambition, the exclusive goal of Taste.

Even in the centuries which appear to us to be the most monstrous and foolish, the immortal appetite for beauty has always found satisfaction.

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

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.

Common sense tells us that the things of the earth exist only a little, and that true reality is only in dreams.

There are moments of existence when time and space are more profound, and the awareness of existence is immensely heightened.

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.

The dance can reveal everything mysterious that is hidden in music, and it has the additional merit of being human and palpable. Dancing is poetry with arms and legs.

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.

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.

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

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.

Always be a poet, even in prose.

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.

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

Inspiration comes of working every day.