If rape or arson, poison or the knifeHas wove no pleasing patterns in the stuffOf this drab canvas we accept as life -It is because we are not bold enough!

To be wicked is never excusable, but there is some merit in knowing that you are; the most irreparable of vices is to do evil from stupidity.

Flesh is willing, but the Soul requiresSisyphean patience for its song,Time, Hippocrates remarked, is shortand Art is long.

The old Paris is no more (the form of a city changes faster, alas! than a mortal’s heart).

On peut chercher dans Dieu le complice et l’ami qui manquent toujours. Dieu est l’éternel confident dans cette tragédie dont chacun est le héros.

Thanks be to God, Who gives us sufferingas sacred remedy for all our sins,that best and purest essence which preparesthe strong in spirit for divine delights!

I have felt the wind on the wing of madness.

Tell me, enigmatical man, whom do you love best, your father,Your mother, your sister, or your brother?I have neither father, nor mother, nor sister, nor brother.Your friends?Now you use a word whose meaning I have...

The Devil pulls the strings which make us dance;We find delight in the most loathsome things;Some furtherance of Hell each new day brings,And yet we feel no horror in that rank advance.

Le Poète est semblable au prince des nuéesQui hante la tempête et se rit de l’archer;Exilé sur le sol au milieu des huées,Ses ailes de géant l’empêchent de marcher.

A friend of mine, the most innocuous dreamer who ever lived, once set a forest on fire to see, as he said, if it would catch as easily as people said. The first ten times...

Always be a poet, even in prose.

My heart is lost; the beasts have eaten it.

Good sense tells us that earthly things are rare and fleeting, and that true reality exists only in dreams. To draw sustenance from happiness- natural or artificial – you must first have the courage to...

—Hypocrite lecteur,—mon semblable,—mon frère!

«¡No renuncies jamás a tus sueños, los cuerdos nada saben del sueño admirable de un loco!»

A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors.

Ant swarming CityCity full of dreamsWhere in broad day the specter tugs your sleeve

If the word doesn’t exist, invent it; but first be sure it doesn’t exist.

La plus belle des ruses du diable est de vous persuader qu’il n’existe pas.”(“The devil’s finest trick is to persuade you that he does not exist.”)

Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recaptured at will.

I set out to discover the why of it, and to transform my pleasure into knowledge.

Looking from outside into an open window one never sees as much as when one looks through a closed window. There is nothing more profound, more mysterious, more pregnant, more insidious, more dazzling than a...

The beautiful is always bizarre.

I sit in the sky like a sphinx misunderstood; My heart of snow is wed to the whiteness of swans; I hate the movement that displaces the rigid lines, With lips untaught neither tears nor...

Oh, Creator! Can monsters exist in the sight of him who alone knows how they were invented, how they invented themselves, and how they might not have invented themselves?

Relate comic things in pompous fashion. Irregularity, in other words the unexpected, the surprising, the astonishing, are essential to and characteristic of beauty. Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony. The blend of the grotesque...

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

The mainspring of genius is curiosity.

That which is not slightly distorted lacks sensible appeal; from which it follows that irregularity—that is to say, the unexpected, surprise and astonishment, are an essential part and characteristic of beauty.

Il me semble que je serais toujours bien la ou je ne suis pas.It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not.

Life has but one true charm: the charm of the game. But what if we’re indifferent to whether we win or lose?

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

As a small child, I felt in my heart two contradictory feelings, the horror of life and the ecstasy of life.

Inspiration comes of working every day.

Abolishers of the soul (materialists) are necessarily abolishers of hell, they, certainly, are interested. At all events, they are people who fear to live again–lazy people.

I am a cemetery by the moon unblessed.

There are women who inspire you with the desire to conquer them and to take your pleasure of them; but this one fills you only with the desire to die slowly beneath her gaze.

And yetto wine, to opium even, I preferthe elixir of your lips on which love flaunts itself;and in the wasteland of desireyour eyes afford the wells to slake my thirst.

What strange phenomena we find in a great city, all we need do is stroll about with our eyes open. Life swarms with innocent monsters.

The immense appetite we have for biography comes from a deep-seated sense of equality.

Time to get drunk!Don’t be martyred slaves of Time,Get drunk!Stay drunk!On wine, virtue, poetry, whatever!

He possessed the logic of all good intentions and a knowledge of all the tricks of his trade, and yet he never succeeded at anything, because he believed too much in the impossible. Surprising? Why...

A soul is a thing so impalpable, so often useless and sometimes such a nuisance, that the loss of it disturbed me less than if I had lost my visiting card while taking a walk.

SpleenJe suis comme le roi d’un pays pluvieux,Riche, mais impuissant, jeune et pourtant très vieux,Qui, de ses précepteurs méprisant les courbettes,S’ennuie avec ses chiens comme avec d’autres bêtes.Rien ne peut l’égayer, ni gibier, ni faucon,Ni...

Strangeness is a necessary ingredient in beauty.

The solitary and thoughtful stroller finds a singular intoxication in this universal communion. The man who loves to lose himself in a crowd enjoys feverish delights that the egoist locked up in himself as in...

And, drunk with my own madness, I shouted at him furiously, “Make life beautiful! Make life beautiful!

Music fathoms the sky.

He who looks through an open window sees fewer things than he who looks through a closed window.