Today I felt pass over me A breath of wind from the wings of madness.

The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries out in terror before he is defeated.

Be always drunken. Nothing else matters: that is the only question. If you would not feel the horrible burden of time weighing on your shoulders and crushing you to the earth, be drunken continually.

By nature, by necessity itself, [primitive man] is encyclopedic, while civilized man finds himself confined in the infinitely small regions of specialization.

Unable to suppress love, the Church wanted at least to disinfect it, and it created marriage.

The being who, for most men, is the source of the most lively, and even, be it said, to the shame of philosophical delights, the most lasting joys; the being towards or for whom all their efforts tend for whom and by whom fortunes are made and lost; for whom, but especially by whom, artists and poets compose their most delicate jewels; from whom flow the most enervating pleasures and the most enriching sufferings - woman, in a word, is not, for the artist in general... only the female of the human species. She is rather a divinity, a star.

There is no sweeter pleasure than to surprise a man by giving him more than he hopes for.