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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Evil is committed without effort, naturally, fatally; goodness is always the product of some art.

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

Always be a poet, even in prose.

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

Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet upon the same road, one of them has to give place.

The lover of life makes the whole world into his family, just as the lover of the fair sex creates his from all the lovely women he has found, from those that could be found, and those who are impossible to find.

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.

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.

A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.

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.

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.

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

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.

Inspiration comes of working every day.

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

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

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

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

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.