The pleasure we derive from the representation of the present is due, not only to the beauty it can be clothed in, but also to its essential quality of being the present.

Go then, a starveling girl With no perfume or pearls, Only your nudity O my beauty!

The taste for pleasure attaches us to the present. The concern with our salvation leaves us hanging on the future.

Alas, human vices, however horrible one might imagine them to be, contain the proof (were it only in their infinite expansion) of man's longing for the infinite; but it is a longing that often takes the wrong route. It is my belief that the reason behind all culpable excesses lies in this depravation of the sense of the infinite.

Where one should see only what is beautiful, our public looks only for what is true.

An artist is an artist only because of his exquisite sense of beauty, a sense which shows him intoxicating pleasures, but which at the same time implies and contains an equally exquisite sense of all deformities and all disproportion.

A Dandy does nothing.