Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet upon the same road, one of them has to give place.

Strangeness is a necessary ingredient in beauty.

For me, Romanticism is the most recent and the most current expression of beauty.

There exist certain individuals who are, by nature, given purely to contemplation and are utterly unsuited to action, and who, nevertheless, under a mysterious and unknown impulse, sometimes act with a speed which they themselves would have thought beyond them.

What a mysterious faculty is that queen of the faculties!

Life has but one true charm: the charm of the game. But what if we’re indifferent to whether we win or lose?

The whole visible universe is but a storehouse of images and signs to which the imagination will give a relative place and value; it is a sort of pasture which the imagination must digest and transform.