If photography is allowed to stand in for art in some of its functions it will soon supplant or corrupt it completely thanks to the natural support it will find in the stupidity of the multitude. It must return to its real task, which is to be the servant of the sciences and the arts, but the very humble servant, like printing and shorthand which have neither created nor supplanted literature.

What a mysterious faculty is that queen of the faculties!

Everything for me becomes allegory

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.

An artist is an artist only because of his exquisite sense of beauty, a sense which shows him intoxicating pleasures, but which at the same time implies and contains an equally exquisite sense of all deformities and all disproportion.

The taste for pleasure attaches us to the present. The concern with our salvation leaves us hanging on the future.

In my mind it strolls, as well as in my apartment. A cat, strong, sweet and delightful.