We love women in proportion to their degree of strangeness to us.

Within the bottle's depths, the wine's soul sang one night. Drink wine, drink poetry, drink virtue.

In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men.

How little remains of the man I once was, save the memory of him! But remembering is only a new form of suffering.

All fashions are charming, or rather relatively charming, each one being a new striving, more or less well conceived, after beauty, an approximate statement of an ideal, the desire for which constantly teases the unsatisfied human mind.

To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world—impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito.

But a dandy can never be a vulgar man