February days are a marketing gimmick; love happens every day.
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.
Charles Baudelaire
The man who says his evening prayer is a captain posting his sentinels. He can sleep.
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.
Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and calculation.
Any man who does not accept the conditions of human life sells his soul.
We all have the republican spirit in our veins, like syphilis in our bones. We are democratized and venerealized.
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.
True Civilization does not lie in gas, nor in steam, nor in turn-tables. It lies in the reduction of the traces of original sin.
All forms of beauty, like all possible phenomena, contain an element of the eternal and an element of the transitory -- of the absolute and of the particular. Absolute and eternal beauty does not exist, or rather it is only an abstraction creamed from the general surface of different beauties. The particular element in each manifestation comes from the emotions: and just as we have our own particular emotions, so we have our own beauty.
Hypocrite reader -- my fellow -- my brother!
Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.
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.
The whole visible universe is but a storehouse of images and signs to which the imagination will give a relative place and value; it is a sort of pasture which the imagination must digest and transform.
What is exhilarating in bad taste is the aristocratic pleasure of giving offense.
Nothing can be done except little by little.
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.
For the perfect idler, for the passionate observer it becomes an immense source of enjoyment to establish his dwelling in the throng, in the ebb and flow, the bustle, the fleeting and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel at home anywhere; to see the world, to be at the very center of the world, and yet to be unseen of the world, such are some of the minor pleasures of those independent, intense and impartial spirits, who do not lend themselves easily to linguistic definitions. The observer is a prince enjoying his incognito wherever he goes.
The world only goes round by misunderstanding.
Alas, human vices, however horrible one might imagine them to be, contain the proof (were it only in their infinite expansion) of man's longing for the infinite; but it is a longing that often takes the wrong route. It is my belief that the reason behind all culpable excesses lies in this depravation of the sense of the infinite.
There are in every man, always, two simultaneous allegiances, one to God, the other to Satan. Invocation of God, or Spirituality, is a desire to climb higher; that of Satan, or animality, is delight in descent.
The cannon thunders... limbs fly in all directions... one can hear the groans of victims and the howling of those performing the sacrifice... it's Humanity in search of happiness.
A sweetheart is a bottle of wine, a wife is a wine bottle.
Inspiration comes of working every day.
On the day when a young writer corrects his first proof-sheet he is as proud as a schoolboy who has just got his first dose of pox.
The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he doesn't exist
The life of our city is rich in poetic and marvelous subjects. We are enveloped and steeped as though in an atmosphere of the marvelous; but we do not notice it.
Every offense is avenged on earth.
Johann von Goethe
A judge who cannot punish, in the end associates themselves with the criminal.
The greater the knowledge, the greater the doubt.
What is not fully understood is not possessed.
Never by reflection, but only by doing is self-knowledge possible to one.
Nothing shows a man's character more than what he laughs at.
We eagerly get hold of a law that serves as a weapon to our passions.
Napoleon affords us an example of the danger of elevating one's self to the absolute, and sacrificing everything to the carrying out of an idea.
I've studied now Philosophy and Jurisprudence, Medicine -- and even, alas! Theology -- from end to end with labor keen; and here, poor fool with all my lore I stand, no wiser than before.
In the end we retain from our studies only that which we practically apply.
Everywhere, we learn only from those whom we love.
No one as ever completed their apprenticeship.
Letters are among the most significant memorial a person can leave behind them.
There is nothing in the world more shameful than establishing one's self on lies and fables.
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