My love, do you recall the object which we saw, That fair, sweet, summer morn! At a turn in the path a foul carcass On a gravel strewn bed, Its legs raised in the air, like a lustful woman, Burning and dripping with poisons, Displayed in a shameless, nonchalant way Its belly, swollen with gases.

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

Finer than any sand are dusts of gold that gleam, Vague starpoints, in the mystic iris of their eyes.

The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries out in terror before he is defeated.

I consider it useless and tedious to represent what exists, because nothing that exists satisfies me. Nature is ugly, and I prefer the monsters of my fancy to what is positively trivial.

There is no such thing as a long piece of work, except one that you dare not start.

Who among us has not dreamt, in moments of ambition, of the miracle of a poetic prose, musical without rhythm and rhyme, supple and staccato enough to adapt to the lyrical stirrings of the soul, the undulations of dreams, and sudden leaps of consciousness.