Who would dare assign to art the sterile function of imitating nature?

If the poet has pursued a moral objective, he has diminished his poetic force.

However incoherent a human existence may be, human unity is not bothered by it.

Any man who does not accept the conditions of life sells his soul.

There exist certain individuals who are, by nature, given purely to contemplation and are utterly unsuited to action, and who, nevertheless, under a mysterious and unknown impulse, sometimes act with a speed which they themselves would have thought beyond them.

With wine, poetry, or virtue as you choose. But get drunk.

Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.