From that moment onwards, our loathsome society rushed, like Narcissus, to contemplate its trivial image on a metallic plate. A form of lunacy, an extraordinary fanaticism took hold of these new sun-worshippers.

Through the Unknown, we'll find the New

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

There is no more steely barb than that of the Infinite.

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, all its poetry and all its charity, to the unexpected as it comes along, to the stranger as he passes.

A sweetheart is a bottle of wine, a wife is a wine bottle.

The unique and supreme voluptuousness of love lies in the certainty of committing evil. And men and women know from birth that in evil is found all sensual delight.