The principal thing in the world is to keep the soul aloft.
Concern for morality makes every work of the imagination false and stupid.
Snicker on hearing his name: 'the gentleman who thinks we are descended from the apes.'
The morality of art is in its very beauty.
Noble characters and pure affections and happy scenes are very comforting things. They're a refuge from life's disillusionments.
For every bourgeois, in the heat of youth, if only for a day, for a minute, has believed himself capable of immense passions, of heroic enterprises. The most mediocre libertine has dreamed of oriental princesses; every rotary carries about inside him the debris of a poet.