You have to be always drunk. That's all there is to it-it's the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk. But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk.

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.

Dancing can reveal all the mystery that music conceals.

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

Every healthy man can do without food for two days — but without poetry, never!

It is this admirable and immortal instinct for beauty which causes us to regard the earth and its spectacles as a glimpse, a correspondence of the beyond.

And, drunk with my own madness, I shouted at him furiously, "Make life beautiful! Make life beautiful!