The immense profundity of thought in vulgar locutions, like holes dug by generations of ants.

For me, Romanticism is the most recent and the most current expression of beauty.

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.

Above my cradle loomed the bookcase where/ Latin ashes and the dust of Greece/ mingled with novels, history, and verse/ in one dark Babel. I was folio-high/ when I first heard the voices.

Being a useful man has always seemed to me to be something truly hideous.

We are weighed down, every moment, by the conception and the sensation of Time. And there are but two means of escaping and forgetting this nightmare: pleasure and work. Pleasure consumes us. Work strengthens us. Let us choose.

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