Where one should see only what is beautiful, our public looks only for what is true.

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.

Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and calculation.

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

Today I felt pass over me A breath of wind from the wings of madness.

Like those great sphinxes lounging through eternity in noble attitudes upon the desert sand, they gaze incuriously at nothing, calm and wise.

As the end of the century approaches, all our culture is like flies at the beginning of winter. Having lost their agility, dreamy and demented, they turn slowly about the window in the first icy mists of morning, . . . [then] they fall down the curtains.