Even in the centuries which appear to us to be the most monstrous and foolish, the immortal appetite for beauty has always found satisfaction.

It would be difficult for me not to conclude that the most perfect type of masculine beauty is Satan, as portrayed by Milton.

I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no Melancholy.

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

Whether you come from heaven or hell, what does it matter, O Beauty!

An artist is an artist only because of his exquisite sense of beauty, a sense which shows him intoxicating pleasures, but which at the same time implies and contains an equally exquisite sense of all deformities and all disproportion.

There are as many kinds of beauty as there are habitual ways of seeking happiness.

Beauty is the sole ambition, the exclusive goal of Taste.

The pleasure we derive from the representation of the present is due, not only to the beauty it can be clothed in, but also to its essential quality of being the present.

Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and calculation.

For the merchant, even honesty is a financial speculation.

To say the word Romanticism is to say modern art - that is, intimacy, spirituality, color, aspiration towards the infinite, expressed by every means available to the arts.

Modernity is the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, which make up one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immutable. This transitory fugitive element, which is constantly changing, must not be despised or neglected.

Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.

Common sense tells us that the things of the earth exist only a little, and that true reality is only in dreams.

This life is a hospital in which every patient is possessed with a desire to change his bed.

It is by universal misunderstanding that all agree. For if, by ill luck, people understood each other, they would never agree.

Nature... is nothing but the inner voice of self-interest.

Nature is a temple in which living columns sometimes emit confused words. Man approaches it through forests of symbols, which observe him with familiar glances.

Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry.

Always be a poet, even in prose.

It is the hour to be drunken! to escape being the martyred slaves of time, be ceaselessly drunk. On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.

It is time to get drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of Time, get drunk get drunk without stopping! On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.

Those men get along best with women who can get along best without them.

The unique and supreme voluptuousness of love lies in the certainty of committing evil. And men and women know from birth that in evil is found all sensual delight.

Even if it were proven that God didn't exist, Religion would still be Saintly and Divine.

Our religion is itself profoundly sad - a religion of universal anguish, and one which, because of its very catholicity, grants full liberty to the individual and asks no better than to be celebrated in each man's own language - so long as he knows anguish and is a painter.

There exist only three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill, to create.

The dance can reveal everything mysterious that is hidden in music, and it has the additional merit of being human and palpable. Dancing is poetry with arms and legs.

Inspiration comes of working every day.