Good sense tells us that earthly things are rare and fleeting, and that true reality exists only in dreams. To draw sustenance from happiness- natural or artificial - you must first have the courage to swallow it; and those who perhaps most merit happiness are precisely those on whom felicity, as mortals conceive it, always acts as a vomitive.

What I say is that the supreme and singular joy of making love resides in the certainty of doing evil.

We all have the republican spirit in our veins, like syphilis in our bones. We are democratized and venerealized.

Both ardent lovers and austere scholars, when once they come to the years of discretion, love cats, so strong and gentle, the pride of the household, who like them are sensitive to the cold, and sedentary.

Poetry has no goal other than itself; it can have no other, and no poem will be so great, so noble, so truly worthy of the name of poem, than one written uniquely for the pleasure of writing a poem.

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

If the word doesn't exist, invent it; but first be sure it doesn't exist.