I tried to discover, in the rumor of forests and waves, words that other men could not hear, and I pricked up my ears to listen to the revelation of their harmony.

Concern for morality makes every work of the imagination false and stupid.

One day, I shall explode like an artillery shell and all my bits will be found on the writing table.

I have patience in all things - as far as the antechamber.

Here is true immorality: ignorance and stupidity; the devil is nothing but this. His name is Legion.

I hate that which we have decided to call realism, even though I have been made one of its high priests.

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.