Even if it were proven that God didn't exist, Religion would still be Saintly and Divine.

In our corruption we perceive beauties unrevealed to ancient times.

It is one of the prodigious privileges of art that the horrific, artistically expressed, becomes beauty, and that sorrow, given rhythm and cadence, fills the spirit with a calm joy.

Go then, a starveling girl With no perfume or pearls, Only your nudity O my beauty!

The old Paris is no more (the form of a city changes faster, alas! than a mortal's heart).

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.

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