Nothing returns, nothing begins anew; it is never the same thing, and yet it seems always the same. For, if the days never return, every moment brings forth new beings whose destiny it will be...

The little girl expects no declaration of tenderness from her doll. She loves it, & that’s all. It is thus that we should love.

To have a solid foundation of skepticism, -that is to say, the faculty of changing at any moment, of turning back, of facing successively the metamorphoses of life.

The vainglory of wishing to understand is dangerous, immoral and, above all, old-fashioned. The modern way – perhaps the final way – is to say: Go forward, without knowing why, as quickly as possible, towards...

And there is neither beginning nor end, nor past nor future; there is only a present, at the same time static and ephemeral, multiple and absolute. It is the vital ocean in which we all...

Chastity—the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions, he added parenthetically, out of Remy de Gourmont.

The pleasure of being a scoundrel can be adequately savored in silence.

To acquire the full consciousness of self is to know oneself so different from others that no longer feels allied with men except by purely animal contacts: nevertheless, among souls of this degree, there is...

Extraordinarily excessive sensuality it may be .. but it all comes down to the same thing in the end, and one means is surely as good as another, since the end obtained is always the...

Each man must grant himself the emotions that he needs and the morality that suits him.

He was a young man of savage & unexpected originality, a diseased genius & quite frankly, a mad genius. Imbeciles grow insane & in their insanity the imbecility remains stagnant or agitated; in the madness...

It was an accident that has endowed man with intelligence. He has made use of it: he invented stupidity.

Tears flow and smiles fade to the same rhythm of life, to disappear together in the bottomless abyss.

Ah! I wish I had the courage to work for the debasement of my contemporaries. What good work it would be to defile their daughters: to insinuate something obscene into the infantile hands which caress...

Deprived of the infinite, man has become what he always was: a supernumerary. He hardly counts; he forms part of the troupe called Humanity; if he misses a cue, he is hissed; and if he...

Man can no more see the world than a fish can see the river bank.

It is not perhaps a question of truthfulness; it is rather a natural incapacity to think for herself, to take cognizance of herself in her own brain, and not in the eyes and in the...

Man is an animal that “arrived”; that is all.

As a matter of fact, when it comes to seeing, men display two tendencies: they see what they wish to see, what is useful to them, what is agreeable. The second is the tendency toward...

It is a communion at once mystic & real, in the guise of metal.Money which is liberty, is also fecundation. It is the universal sperm without which human societies would remain but barren wombs. Paganism,...

It appears, from all this, that our eyes are uncertain. Two persons look at the same clock and there is a difference of two or three minutes in their reading of the time. One has...

The terrible thing about the quest for truth is that you find it.

Abstractions do us much harm by impelling us to the quest of the absolute in all things. Joy does not exist, but there are joys: and these joys may not be folly felt unless they...

How many contradictions! Eh! If I loaded my wagon all on the same side, I’d tumble it over.

Everything, indeed, in a work of art should be unedited,–and even the words, by the manner of grouping them, of shaping them to new meanings,–and one often regrets having an alphabet familiar to too many...

The greater part of a men who speak ill of women are speaking of a certain woman.

Well, suppose we remain upon earth, after all? Suppose we bravely accept the death of our dreams at the same time as the death of our bodies? This beyond is decidedly uncertain, quite vague and...

Nothing is better for “spiritual advancement” & the detachment of the flesh than a close reading of the “Erotic Dictionary.

Demons are like obedient dogs; they come when they are called.

Autumn is as joyful and sweet as an untimely end.

To be a member of such a crowd … is not much to be far removed from solitude; the freedom of everyone is assured by the freedom to which everyone else lays claim.