What I say is that the supreme and singular joy of making love resides in the certainty of doing evil.

The cannon thunders... limbs fly in all directions... one can hear the groans of victims and the howling of those performing the sacrifice... it's Humanity in search of happiness.

The old Paris is no more (the form of a city changes faster, alas! than a mortal's heart).

Every healthy man can do without food for two days — but without poetry, never!

From that moment onwards, our loathsome society rushed, like Narcissus, to contemplate its trivial image on a metallic plate. A form of lunacy, an extraordinary fanaticism took hold of these new sun-worshippers.

Nature is a word, an allegory, a mold, an embossing, if you will.

And, drunk with my own madness, I shouted at him furiously, "Make life beautiful! Make life beautiful!