In order not to feel time's horrid fardel bruise your shoulders, grinding you into the earth, get drunk and stay that way. On what? On wine, poetry, virtue, whatever. But get drunk!

To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.

If wine disappeared from human production, I believe there would be, in the health and intellect of the planet, a void, a deficiency far more terrible than all the excesses and deviations for which wine is made responsible. Is it not reasonable to suggest that people that never drink wine, whether naive or doctrinaire, are fools or hypocrites....?

The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries out in terror before he is defeated.

There exist only three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill, to create.

Blessed art Thou, Lord, who giveth suffering As a divine remedy for our impurities.

It is unfortunately very true that, without leisure and money, love can be no more than an orgy of the common man. Instead of being a sudden impulse full of ardor and reverie, it becomes a distastefully utilitarian affair.