Strangeness is a necessary ingredient in beauty.

Love is a taste for prostitution. In fact, there is no noble pleasure that cannot be reduced to Prostitution.

The man who is unable to people his solitude is equally unable to be alone in a bustling crowd. The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be himself or some one else, as he chooses. [...] The solitary and thoughtful stroller finds a singular intoxication in this universal communion. [...] 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...to the unexpected as it comes along, the stranger as he passes.

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

In this horror of solitude, this need to lose his ego in exterior flesh, which man calls grandly the need for love.

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.

My soul travels on the smell of perfume like the souls of other men on music.