Alas! Man's vices, horrible as they are supposed to be, contain the positive proof of his taste for the infinite.

It is at despair at not being able to be noble and beautiful by natural means that we have made up our faces so strangely.

I will drop into your chest like a vegetal ambrosia. I will be the grain that regenerates the cruelly plowed furrow. Poetry will be born of our intimate union. A god we shall create together, and we shall soar heavenward like sunbeams, perfumes, butterflies, birds, and all winged things.

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

Dandyism is the last flicker of heroism in decadent ages.... Dandyism is a setting sun; like the declining star, it is magnificent, without heat and full of melancholy. But alas! the rising tide of democracy, which spreads everywhere and reduces everything to the same level, is daily carrying away these last champions of human pride, and submerging, in the waters of oblivion, the last traces of these remarkable myrmidons.

My soul travels on the smell of perfume like the souls of other men on music.

Where ever I am not is the place where I am myself.