Great Throughts Treasury

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

"Through the Unknown, we'll find the New."

"To be a great man and a saint for oneself, that is the only important thing."

"To be a useful man - I think there has always been something very repulsive."

"To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the center of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world?impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito."

"To be just, that is to say, to justify its existence, criticism should be partial, passionate and political, that is to say, written from an exclusive point of view, but a point of view that opens up the widest horizons."

"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."

"To do one's duty every day and trust in God for tomorrow."

"To dream magnificently is not a gift given to all men, and even for those who possess it, it runs a strong risk of being progressively diminished by the ever-growing dissipation of modern life and by the restlessness engendered by material progress. The ability to dream is a divine and mysterious ability; because it is through dreams that man communicates with the shadowy world which surrounds him. But this power needs solitude to develop freely; the more one concentrates, the more one is likely to dream fully, deeply."

"To fornicate is to aspire to enter into another; the artist never emerges from himself."

"To glorify the cult of images (my great, my only, my earliest passion)."

"To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery."

"To know means that contradict. There is a degree of non - contradiction does not amount to nothing but a lie."

"To love and to die in the land that is like you."

"To love intelligent women is the pleasure of a pederast."

"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."

"To the solemn graves, near a lonely cemetery, my heart like a muffled drum is beating funeral marches."

"To the very expensive to the very beautiful who fills my heart with light, to the angel, In the immortal idol, high in immortality! It spreads in my life as an air impregnated with salt, and my soul unsatisfied verse taste of the eternal. Always fresh sachet that perfumes the atmosphere of an expensive reduced censer forgotten who smokes in secret through the night, how, incorruptible love, I express you true? Musk grain which is, invisible, the depths of my eternity! In very good, the beautiful who is my joy and my health, to the angel, to the immortal idol, Hi in immortality!"

"Today I felt pass over me A breath of wind from the wings of madness."

"Today I had a strange warning. I felt the wind of insanity brush my mind."

"Torture, as the art of discovering the truth, is barbaric nonsense; it is the application of a material means to a spiritual end."

"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."

"Twilight, how gentle you are and how tender! The rosy lights that still linger on the horizon, like the last agony of day under the conquering might of its night; the flaring candle-flames that stain with dull red the last glories of the sunset; the heavy draperies that an invisible hand draws out of the depths of the East, mimic all those complex feelings that war on one another in the heart of man at the solemn moments of life."

"Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony."

"Unable to do away with love, the Church found a way to decontaminate it by creating marriage."

"Unable to suppress love, the Church wanted at least to disinfect it, and it created marriage."

"Vegetal ambrosia, precious grain scattered by the eternal Sower, I shall descend in you so that from our love there will be born poetry, which will spring up toward God like a rare flower!"

"Wandering aimlessly, broken by my thoughts, which slowly sharpened daggers at my heart."

"We all have the republican spirit in our veins, like syphilis in our bones. We are democratized and venerealized."

"We are all born marked for evil."

"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."

"We have psychologized like the insane, who aggravate their madness in struggling to understand it."

"We have to add two rights to the list of human rights. The right to disorder and the right to leave"

"We looked oblivion-n love: what good! For me love is all a bed of thorns, made let these girls drinking terrible!"

"We love women in proportion to their degree of strangeness to us."

"We revel in the laxness of the path we take."

"We should work: if not by preference, at least out of despair. All things considered, work is less boring than amusement."

"What a mysterious faculty is that queen of the faculties!"

"What can an eternity of damnation matter to someone who has felt, if only for a second, the infinity of delight?"

"What could be more simple and more complex, more obvious and more profound than a portrait."

"What do I care if you are good? Be beautiful! and be sad!"

"What good is it to accomplish projects, when the project itself is enjoyment enough?"

"What I have always found most beautiful in the theatre, in my childhood, and still today, is lustre--a beautiful object, luminous, crystalline, complex, circular, symmetrical. However, I do not absolutely deny the value of dramatic literature. Only, I should like the actors to be mounted on high pattens, to wear masks more expressive than the human face, and to speak through megaphones."

"What I say is that the supreme and singular joy of making love resides in the certainty of doing evil."

"What is annoying in love, is that it is a crime in which one cannot do without an accomplice."

"What is art? Prostitution."

"What is exhilarating in bad taste is the aristocratic pleasure of giving offense."

"What is intoxicating about bad taste is the aristocratic pleasure of offensiveness."

"What is it that brings on these moods of yours?"

"What is love? The need to come out of himself. Man is a doting animal. Worship is self-sacrifice? So it is all the love of prostitution. Of all the creatures prostitute is the highest creature, God, because he is each individual's supreme friend, because he is the common love , an inexhaustible source."