It is the pleasure of astonishing others, and the proud satisfaction of never being astonished by them.

I am unable to understand how a man of honor could take a newspaper in his hands without a shudder of disgust.

We are weighed down, every moment, by the conception and the sensation of Time. And there are but two means of escaping and forgetting this nightmare: pleasure and work. Pleasure consumes us. Work strengthens us. Let us choose.

I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no Melancholy.

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, all its poetry and all its charity, to the unexpected as it comes along, to the stranger as he passes.

What is art? Prostitution.

Today I felt pass over me A breath of wind from the wings of madness.