In this horror of solitude, this need to lose his ego in exterior flesh, which man calls grandly the need for love.

It is necessary to work, if not from inclination, at least from despair. Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.

Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.

The man who is unable to people his solitude is equally unable to be alone in a bustling crowd. The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be himself or some one else, as he chooses. [...] The solitary and thoughtful stroller finds a singular intoxication in this universal communion. [...] What men call love is a very small, restricted, feeble thing compared with this ineffable orgy, this divine prostitution of the soul giving itself entire...to the unexpected as it comes along, the stranger as he passes.

Above my cradle loomed the bookcase where/ Latin ashes and the dust of Greece/ mingled with novels, history, and verse/ in one dark Babel. I was folio-high/ when I first heard the voices.

This industry [photography], by invading the territories of art, has become art's most mortal enemy.

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.