1. “Common sense tells us that the things of the earth exist only a little, and that true reality is only in dreams.”
2. “Genius is childhood recalled at will.”
3. “A tender heart unnerved by nothingness hoards every fragment of the radiant past.”
4. “Anybody, providing he knows how to be amusing, has the right to talk about himself.”
5. “By a fatal law, a genius is always an idiot.”
6. “Evil is done without effort, naturally, it is the working of fate; good is always the product of an art.”
7. “Strangeness is a necessary ingredient in beauty.”
8. “Remembering is only a new form of suffering.”
9. “Music fathoms the sky.”
10. “All which is beautiful and noble is the result of reason and calculation.”
11. “The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries with terror before being defeated.”
12. “The world only goes round by misunderstanding.”
13. “It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.”
14. “Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony.”
15. “To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.”
16. “Those men get along best with women who can get along best without them.”
17. “God is the only being who, in order to reign, doesn’t even need to exist.”
18. “There exists only three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill, to create.”
19. “Progress, this great heresy of decay.”
20. “Any man who does not accept the conditions of life sells his soul.”
21. “We revel in the laxness of the path we take.”
22. “Inspiration comes of working every day.”
23. “What is exhilarating in bad taste is the aristocratic pleasure of giving offense.”
24. “The beautiful is always bizarre.”
25. “Nothing can be done except little by little.”
26. “If the poet has pursued a moral objective, he has diminished his poetic force.”
27. “Nations, like families, have great men only in spite of themselves.”
28. “A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors.”
29. “The act of love greatly resembles torture or surgery.”
30. “Always be a poet, even in prose.”
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