Menacing lines of black tomorrows on the horizon.

Every one has a sum of physical and moral suffering to pay, and whoever does not settle it here below, defrays it after death; happiness is only lent, and must be repaid; its very phantoms...

Life is an unpleasant business. I have resolved to spend it reflecting on it.

Worshiping the Devil is no more insane than worshiping God…It is precisely at the moment when positivism is at its high-water mark that mysticism stirs into life and the follies of occultism begin.

Le démon ne peut rien sur la volonté, très peu sur l’intelligence et tout sur l’imagination.

Far from seeking to justify, as does the Church, the necessity of torments and afflictions, he cried, in his outraged pity: ‘If a God has made this world, I should not wish to be that...

Ah; but my courage fails me, and my heart is sick within me! —Lord, take pity on the Christian who doubts, on the skeptic who would fain believe, on the galley-slave of life who puts...

I wish to confound all these people, to create a work of art of a supernatural realism and of a spiritualist naturalism. I wish to prove… that nothing is explained in the mysteries which surround...

Goya’s savage verve, his harsh, brutal genius, captivated Des Esseintes. On the other hand, the universal admiration his works had won rather put him off, and for years he had refrained from framing them, for...

Art and prayer are the only decent ejaculations of the soul.

How inferior the human machine is, compared to man-made machines. They can be decoked, unscrewed, oiled and parts replaced. Decidedly, nature is not a very wonderful thing.

Really, when I think it over, literature has only one excuse for existing; it saves the person who makes it from the disgustingness of life.