One's existence should be in two parts: one should live like a bourgeois and think like a demigod.

Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.

Of all possible debauches, traveling is the greatest that I know; that's the one they invented when they got tired of all the others.

I love my work with a frenetic and perverse love, as an ascetic loves the hair shirt which scratches his belly.

If you knew all the dreams I've dreamed!

He loved a book because it was a book; he loved its odor, its form, its title. What he loved in a manuscript was its old illegible date, the bizarre and strange Gothic characters, the heavy gilding which loaded its drawings. It was its pages covered with dust — dust of which he breathed the sweet and tender perfume with delight.

Everyone, either from modesty or egotism, hides away the best and most delicate of his soul’s possessions; to gain the esteem of others, we must only ever show our ugliest sides; this is how we keep ourselves on the common level