Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recaptured at will.

The more a man cultivates the arts the less he fornicates. A more and more apparent cleavage occurs between the spirit and the brute.

I sit in the sky like a sphinx misunderstood; My heart of snow is wed to the whiteness of swans; I hate the movement that displaces the rigid lines, With lips untaught neither tears nor laughter do I know.

To the solemn graves, near a lonely cemetery, my heart like a muffled drum is beating funeral marches.

The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be himself and others, as he wishes.

All forms of beauty, like all possible phenomena, contain an element of the eternal and an element of the transitory - of the absolute and of the particular. Absolute and eternal beauty does not exist, or rather it is only an abstraction creamed from the general surface of different beauties. The particular element in each manifestation comes from the emotions: and just as we have our own particular emotions, so we have our own beauty.

If the poet has pursued a moral objective, he has diminished his poetic force.