I love Wagner, but the music I prefer is that of a cat hung up by its tail outside a window and trying to stick to the panes of glass with its claws.

For the merchant, even honesty is a financial speculation.

I think I would be happy in that place I happen not to be, and this question of moving house is the subject of a perpetual dialogue I have with my soul.

As the end of the century approaches, all our culture is like flies at the beginning of winter. Having lost their agility, dreamy and demented, they turn slowly about the window in the first icy mists of morning, . . . [then] they fall down the curtains.

What could be more simple and more complex, more obvious and more profound than a portrait.

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

Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet upon the same road, one of them has to give place.