Unable to suppress love, the Church wanted at least to disinfect it, and it created marriage.

Theory of the true civilization. It is not to be found in gas or steam or table turning. It consists in the diminution of the traces of original sin.

Go then, a starveling girl With no perfume or pearls, Only your nudity O my beauty!

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

One should always be drunk. That's all that matters...But with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you chose. But get drunk.

The vices of man, as full of horror as one might suppose them to be, contain the proof (if in nothing else but their infinitely expandable nature) of his taste for the infinite; only, it is a taste that often takes a wrong turn.

I think I would be happy in that place I happen not to be, and this question of moving house is the subject of a perpetual dialogue I have with my soul.