There is no dream of love, however ideal it may be, which does not end up with a fat, greedy baby hanging from the breast.

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.

Life swarms with innocent monsters.

The true voyagers are those who go for the sake of traveling . . . and without quite knowing why, they say, 'Let us depart!'.

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.

Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony.

It is by universal misunderstanding that all agree. For if, by ill luck, people understood each other, they would never agree.