My heart is lost; the beasts have eaten it.

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

Who would dare assign to art the sterile function of imitating nature?

Whether you come from heaven or hell, what does it matter, O Beauty!

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

With wine, poetry, or virtue as you choose. But get drunk.

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.