We are weighed down, every moment, by the conception and the sensation of Time. And there are but two means of escaping and forgetting this nightmare: pleasure and work. Pleasure consumes us. Work strengthens us. Let us choose.
Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.
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 signifies the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art of which the other half is the eternal and the immutable.
As a small child, I felt in my heart two contradictory feelings, the horror of life and the ecstasy of life.
For each letter received from a creditor, write fifty lines on an extraterrestrial subject and you will be saved.
The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries with terror before being defeated.
I have cultivated my hysteria with pleasure and terror.
But a dandy can never be a vulgar man.
Progress, this great heresy of decay.
If the poet has pursued a moral objective, he has diminished his poetic force.
I am unable to understand how a man of honor could take a newspaper in his hands without a shudder of disgust.
Any newspaper, from the first line to the last, is nothing but a web of horrors, I cannot understand how an innocent hand can touch a newspaper without convulsing in disgust.
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.
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.
To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.
Beauty is the sole ambition, the exclusive goal of Taste.
I consider it useless and tedious to represent what exists, because nothing that exists satisfies me. Nature is ugly, and I prefer the monsters of my fancy to what is positively trivial.
France is not poetic; she even feels, in fact, a congenital horror of poetry. Among the writers who use verse, those whom she will always prefer are the most prosaic.
To be a great man and a saint for oneself, that is the only important thing.
