At a period when Literature was wont to attribute the grief of living exclusively to the mischances of disappointed love or the jealousy of adulterou….

He realized at last that the arguments of pessimism were powerless to comfort him.

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

In the matter of animals I love only cats, but I love them unreasonably for their qualities and in spite of their numerous faults. I have only one, b….

The loveliest tune imaginable becomes vulgar and insupportable as soon as the public begins to hum it and the hurdy-gurdies make it their own..

Menacing lines of black tomorrows on the horizon..

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 w….

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 belief that man is an irresolute creature pulled this way and that by two forces of equal strength, alternately winning and losing the battle for….

(Baudelaire) had descended to the bottom of the inexhaustible mine, had picked his way along abandoned or unexplored galleries, and had finally reach….

...he shrunk more and more from the realities of life and above all from the society of his day which he regarded with an ever growing horror,--a det….

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

There's no doubt about it - gardeners are the only true artists these days..

The modern painter…is an excellent couturier.

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 s….

Art is the only clean thing on earth, except holiness..

Speaking of dust, ‘out of which we came and to which we shall return,’ do you know that after we are dead our corpses are devoured by different kinds….

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 noth….

In this game he had acquired a great deal of muddled knowledge, more than one approximation and less than one certitude. And absence of energy, a cur….

Already, he was dreaming of a refined solitude, a comfortable desert, a motionless ark in which to seek refuge from the unending deluge of human stup….

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..