Genius is simply childhood, rediscovered by an act of will.

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

Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject, nor exact truth, but in the way of feeling.

There are but three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the warrior and the poet. To know, to kill and to create. The rest of mankind may be taxed and drudged, they are born for the stable, that is to say, to practise what they call professions.

Here comes the time when, vibrating on its stem, every flower fumes like a censer; noises and perfumes circle in the evening air.

Sexuality is the lyricism of the masses.

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.