If photography is allowed to supplement art in some of its functions, it will soon have supplanted or corrupted it altogether, thanks to the stupidity of the multitude which is its natural ally.

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

These beings have no other status, but that of cultivating the idea of beauty in their own persons, of satisfying their passions, of feeling and thinking.... Contrary to what many thoughtless people seem to believe, dandyism is not even an excessive delight in clothes and material elegance. For the perfect dandy, these things are no more than the symbol of the aristocratic superiority of his mind.

I throw fresh seeds out. Who knows what survives?

In literature as in ethics, there is danger, as well as glory, in being subtle. Aristocracy isolates us.

Good sense tells us that earthly things are rare and fleeting, and that true reality exists only in dreams. To draw sustenance from happiness- natural or artificial - you must first have the courage to swallow it; and those who perhaps most merit happiness are precisely those on whom felicity, as mortals conceive it, always acts as a vomitive.

Any newspaper, from the first line to the last, is nothing but a web of horrors, I cannot understand how an innocent hand can touch a newspaper without convulsing in disgust.