A child sees everything in a sense of newness - he is always drunk. Genius is nothing but childhood re-attained at will.

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.

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

What can an eternity of damnation matter to someone who has felt, if only for a second, the infinity of delight?

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.

Woman is natural, that is to say, abominable.

A friend of mine, the most innocuous dreamer who ever lived, once set a forest on fire to see, as he said, if it would catch as easily as people said. The first ten times the experiment was a failure; but on the eleventh it succeeded all too well.