But a dandy can never be a vulgar man

Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man's physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed.

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

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.

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

What men call love is a very small, restricted, feeble thing compared with this ineffable orgy, this divine prostitution of the soul giving itself entire, all its poetry and all its charity, to the unexpected as it comes along, to the stranger as he passes.

Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject, nor exact truth, but in the way of feeling.