Our squalid society rushed, Narcissus to a man, to gaze on its trivial image on a scrap of metal.

All the visible universe is nothing but a shop of images and signs.

Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.

La, tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté Luxe, calme et volupté There, there is nothing else but grace and measure, Richness, quietness, and pleasure.

If wine were to disappear from human production, I believe it would cause an absence, a failure in health and intellect, a void much more terrifying than all the recesses and the deviations for which wine is regarded as responsible.

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

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.