Today I had a strange warning. I felt the wind of insanity brush my mind.
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 churchbell choir.
Wine transforms moles into eagles.
The man who is unable to people his solitude is equally unable to be alone in a bustling crowd. The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be himself or some one else, as he chooses. [...] The solitary and thoughtful stroller finds a singular intoxication in this universal communion. [...] What men call love is a very small, restricted, feeble thing compared with this ineffable orgy, this divine prostitution of the soul giving itself entire...to the unexpected as it comes along, the stranger as he passes.
There can be no progress-real, moral prgress-except in the individual and by the individual himself.
These beings have no other status, but that of cultivating the idea of beauty in their own persons, of satisfying their passions, of feeling and thinking.... Contrary to what many thoughtless people seem to believe, dandyism is not even an excessive delight in clothes and material elegance. For the perfect dandy, these things are no more than the symbol of the aristocratic superiority of his mind.
Oh, Creator! Can monsters exist in the sight of him who alone knows how they were invented, how they invented themselves, and how they might not have invented themselves?
The old Paris is no more (the form of a city changes faster, alas! than a mortal's heart).
Our squalid society rushed, Narcissus to a man, to gaze on its trivial image on a scrap of metal.
Who would dare assign to art the sterile function of imitating nature?
Even when she walks one would believe that she dances.
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 centre 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.
Il faut e pater le bourgeois. One must astound the bourgeois.
If rape or arson, poison or the knife Has wove no pleasing patterns in the stuff Of this drab canvas we accept as life - It is because we are not bold enough!
It would perhaps be nice to be alternately the victim and the executioner.
Be always drunken. Nothing else matters: that is the only question. If you would not feel the horrible burden of time weighing on your shoulders and crushing you to the earth, be drunken continually.
I am bored in France because everyone resembles Voltaire.
When a singer puts his hand on his heart, it means usually, I will always love you!
I am a cemetery abhorred by the moon, In which long worms crawl like remorse.
One must work, if not from inclination, at least out of despair — since it proves, on close examination, that work is less boring than amusing oneself.
Life is a hospital in which every patient is possessed by a desire to change his bed.
On the vaporization and the centralization of the Self. All is there.
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.
Above my cradle loomed the bookcase where/ Latin ashes and the dust of Greece/ mingled with novels, history, and verse/ in one dark Babel. I was folio-high/ when I first heard the voices.
In this horror of solitude, this need to lose his ego in exterior flesh, which man calls grandly the need for love.
Follow AzQuotes on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Every day we present the best quotes! Improve yourself, find your inspiration, share with friends
or simply: