I sit at my door, smoking a cigarette and sipping my absinthe, and I enjoy every day without a care in the world

Take care not to step on the foot of a learned idiot. His bite is incurable.

The missionary is no longer a man, a conscience. He is a corpse, in the hands of a confraternity, without family, without love, without any of the sentiments that are dear to us. Emasculated, in a sense, by his vow of chastity, he offers us the distressing spectacle of a man deformed and impotent or engaged in a stupid and useless struggle with the sacred needs of the flesh, a struggle which, seven times out of ten, leads him to sodomy, the gallows, or prison.

I have always wanted a mistress who was fat, and I have never found one. To make a fool of me, they are always pregnant.

Night is here. All is at rest. My eyes close in order to see without actually understanding the dream that flees before men infinite space; and I experience the languorous sensation produced by the mournful procession of my hopes.

In art, there are only two types of people: revolutionaries and plagiarists. And in the end, doesn't the revolutionary's work become official, once the State takes it over?

In Europe men and women have intercourse because they love each other. In the South Seas they love each other because they have had intercourse. Who is right?