Even in the centuries which appear to us to be the most monstrous and foolish, the immortal appetite for beauty has always found satisfaction.
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.
In literature as in ethics, there is danger, as well as glory, in being subtle. Aristocracy isolates us.
What is exhilarating in bad taste is the aristocratic pleasure of giving offense.
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.
Who would dare assign to art the sterile function of imitating nature?
The priest is an immense being because he makes the crowd believe astonishing things.
I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no Melancholy.
It would perhaps be nice to be alternately the victim and the executioner.
To the solemn graves, near a lonely cemetery, my heart like a muffled drum is beating funeral marches.
Let us beware of common folk, of common sense, of sentiment, of inspiration, and of the obvious.
A sweetheart is a bottle of wine, a wife is a wine bottle.
Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry.
Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and calculation.
All which is beautiful and noble is the result of reason and calculation.
The man who says his evening prayer is a captain posting his sentinels. He can sleep.
I love Wagner, but the music I prefer is that of a cat hung up by its tail outside a window and trying to stick to the panes of glass with its claws.
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.
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.
It would be difficult for me not to conclude that the most perfect type of masculine beauty is Satan, as portrayed by Milton.