To say the word Romanticism is to say modern art - that is, intimacy, spirituality, color, aspiration towards the infinite, expressed by every means available to the arts.

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.

I am a cemetery abhorred by the moon, In which long worms crawl like remorse.

Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and calculation.

Nations, like families, have great men only in spite of themselves. They do everything in their power not to have any. And therefore, the great man, in order to exist, must possess a force of attack which is greater than the force of resistance developed by millions of people.

Multitude, solitude: equal and interchangeable terms for the active and prolific poet.

I sit in the sky like a sphinx misunderstood; My heart of snow is wed to the whiteness of swans; I hate the movement that displaces the rigid lines, With lips untaught neither tears nor laughter do I know.