What is irritating about love is that it is a crime that requires an accomplice.

Beauty is the sole ambition, the exclusive goal of Taste.

To be a great man and a saint to oneself, that's the only important thing.

I consider it useless and tedious to represent what exists, because nothing that exists satisfies me. Nature is ugly, and I prefer the monsters of my fancy to what is positively trivial.

It is at despair at not being able to be noble and beautiful by natural means that we have made up our faces so strangely.

It is one of the prodigious privileges of art that the horrific, artistically expressed, becomes beauty, and that sorrow, given rhythm and cadence, fills the spirit with a calm joy.

Always be a poet, even in prose.