Great Throughts Treasury

"Give me each day strength to perform the present duty and thus to become a hero and a saint."

"Glorious empires can be founded on crime, and noble religions on imposture."

"Go then, a starveling girl with no perfume or pearls, only your nudity. O my beauty!"

"God is a scandal, - a profitable scandal."

"God is the only being who need not even exist in order to reign. Whatever is created by the spirit is more alive than matter."

"God is the only being who, in order to reign, doesn't even need to exist."

"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 swallow it; and those who perhaps most merit happiness are precisely those on whom felicity, as mortals conceive it, always acts as a vomitive."

"Happy is the man who can with vigorous wing Mount to those luminous serene fields! The man whose thoughts, like larks, Take liberated flight toward the morning skies --Who hovers over life and understands without effort The language of flowers and voiceless things!"

"Hashish will be, indeed, for the impressions and familiar thoughts of the man, a mirror which magnifies, yet no more than a mirror."

"He is at once a great lazybones, ambitious pitifully, and famous for unhappiness; For His Entire life I've had practically nothing but half-baked ideas. The sun of laziness, which glows within ceaselessly him, vaporizes him and gnaws away that half-genius bestowed upon him that heaven."

"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 so? He was forever in the act of conceiving it!"

"He sadly resumes his path toward a desert that he knows is similar to the one he just crossed, escorted by the pale phantom they call Reason, who lights up the aridity of his path with a weak lantern, and who, when the thirst of passion comes back from time to time, quenches it with the poison of ennui."

"He who does not know how to people his solitude, does not know either how to be alone in a busy crowd."

"He who garner greedy girlfriend-arms appears in a secret grave in what dying and fondle him."

"He who looks in through an open window never sees so many things as he who looks at a shut window. There is nothing more profound, more mysterious, more fertile, more gloomy, or more dazzling, than a window lighted by a candle. What we can see in the sunlight is always less interesting than what goes on behind the panes of a window. In that dark luminous hollow, life lives, life dreams, life suffers."

"He who looks outside through an open window, never seen as many things as the viewer a closed window."

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

"Here comes the time when, vibrating on its stem, every flower fumes like a censer; noises and perfumes circle in the evening air."

"His giant wings prevent him from walking."

"How bittersweet it is, on winter's night, to listen, by the sputtering, smoking fire, as distant memories, through the fog-dimmed light, rise, to the muffled chime of church-bell choir."

"How difficult it is to understand each other, my dear angel, and how much thought is incommunicable, even between people who love each other!"

"How little remains of the man I once was, save the memory of him! But remembering is only a new form of suffering."

"How others through love would want to master your life, I want her rule by terror."

"However incoherent a human existence may be, human unity is not bothered by it."

"Hypocrite reader -- my fellow -- my brother!"

"I am a cemetery abhorred by the moon, in which long worms crawl like remorse."

"I am a cemetery by the moon unblessed."

"I am a cemetery loathed by the moon."

"I am bored in France because everyone resembles Voltaire."

"I am but little disposed to put things in writing. One almost always regrets doing so."

"I am feeling lonely, since my birth. Despite the family, and the center of colleagues, in particular, - destined to be lonely forever feeling. However, the tendency of very vital for life and fun."

"I am lovely, O mortals, like a dream of stone; and my breast, where everyone is bruised in his turn, has been made to awaken in poets a love that is eternal and as silent as matter. I am throned in blue sky like a sphinx unbeknown; my heart of snow is wed to the whiteness of swans; I detest any movement displacing still lines, and never do I weep and never laugh."

"I am not the Styx to embrace you nine times."

"I am the knife and the wound it deals, I am the slap and the cheek, I am the wheel and the broken limbs, hangman and victim both!"

"I am the vampire at my own veins."

"I am the wound and the knife! I am the slap and the cheek! I am the limbs and the rack, and the victim and the executioner! I am the vampire of my own heart."

"I ask every thinking man to show me what remains of life."

"I believe I already wrote in my notes that love was very similar to torture or surgery. But this concept can be developed in a way most bitter. Even if two lovers are very much in love and full of mutual desires, one of the two will always be calmer or less possessed than the other. The former is the operator or the executioner; the latter is the subject, the victim. Do you hear these sighs, preludes to a tragedy of dishonor, these groans, these cries, gasps these? Who has not uttered them, who has resisted extorting them? And what do you find to be the worst part of the torment applied by the careful torturers? The revolting sleepwalker eyes, the muscles with that limbs stiffen or jump as if They Were galvanized; Certainly, not even The most furious effects of intoxication, delirium or opium Could Provide Such hideous and curious examples. And the human face, Which Ovid believed to be made ??to reflect the stars, is now wearing an expression of ferocity crazy or slackening in some sort of death. Surely, I would think it a sacrilege if I used the word ecstasy for such decomposition."

"I believe that the infinite and mysterious charm that lies in the contemplation of a moving vessel is caused, firstly, by the regularity and symmetry that are among the primordial needs of the human spirit, to the same degree as complication and harmony - and, secondly, by the multiplication and generation of all the imaginary curves and figures produced in space by the real elements of the object. The poetic idea released by this operation of movement in the lines is the hypothesis of a being that is vast, immense, complicated but eurythmic, an animal full of genius, suffering and sighing all the sighs and all the human ambitions."

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

"I can scarcely conceive (would my brain be a spellbound mirror?) a type of beauty without unhappiness. Supported by ? others would say, obsessed by ? these notions, one may conceive it would be difficult for me not to conclude that the most perfect type of masculine beauty is Satan, ? as rendered by Milton."

"I consider it useless and tedious to represent what exists, because nothing that exists satisfies me. Nature is ugly, and I prefer the monsters of my fancy to what is positively trivial."

"I have always been astonished that women were allowed to enter churches. What conversation can they possibly have with God?"

"I have cultivated my hysteria with delight and terror. Now I suffer continually from vertigo, and today, 23rd of January, 1862, I have received a singular warning, I have felt the wind of the wing of madness pass over me."

"I have cultivated my hysteria with pleasure and terror."

"I have felt the wind on the wing of madness."

"I have more memories than if I were a thousand years old."

"I have to confess that I had gambled on my soul and lost it with heroic insouciance and lightness of touch. The soul is so impalpable, so often useless, and sometimes such a nuisance, that I felt no more emotion on losing it than if, on a stroll, I had mislaid my visiting card."

"I know that pain is the one nobility upon which Hell itself cannot encroach."

"I lived for a long time under vast porticos that maritime suns tinted with a thousand fires, and whose great pillars, straight and majestuous in the evening made seem like basaltic caves."