"Music fathoms the sky."

"It is at despair at not being able to be noble and beautiful by natural means that we have made up our faces so strangely."

"And yet to wine, to opium even, I prefer the elixir of your lips on which love flaunts itself; and in the wasteland of desire your eyes afford the wells to slake my thirst."

"In our corruption we perceive beauties unrevealed to ancient times."

"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."

"I love Wagner, but the music I prefer is that of a cat hung up by its tail outside a window and trying to stick to the panes of glass with its claws."

"The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries out in terror before being vanquished."

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

"I sit in the sky like a sphinx misunderstood; My heart of snow is wed to the whiteness of swans; I hate the movement that displaces the rigid lines, With lips untaught neither tears nor laughter do I know."

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

"Nature is a temple, where the living Columns sometimes breathe confusing speech; Man walks within these groves of symbols, each Of which regards him as a kindred thing."

"Abolishers of the soul (materialists) are necessarily abolishers of hell, they, certainly, are interested. At all events, they are people who fear to live again--lazy people."

"Go then, a starveling girl With no perfume or pearls, Only your nudity O my beauty!"

"But what does it matter what reality is outside myself, so long as it has helped me to live, to feel that I am, and what I am?"

"Flesh is willing, but the Soul requires Sisyphean patience for its song, Time, Hippocrates remarked, is short and Art is long."

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

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

"Genius is childhood recovered at will."

"It's the devil who pulls the strings that make us dance"

"The life of our city is rich in poetic and marvelous subjects. We are enveloped and steeped as though in an atmosphere of the marvelous; but we do not notice it."

"Nations, like families, have great men only in spite of themselves."

"Nature is a temple in which living columns sometimes emit confused words. Man approaches it through forests of symbols, which observe him with familiar glances."

"Ant swarming City City full of dreams Where in broad day the specter tugs your sleeve"

"The child, in love with prints and maps, Holds the whole world in his vast appetite. How large the earth is under the lamplight! But in the eyes of memory, how the world is cramped!"

"Fruit free of any bruises, not yet broken open, / With flesh so firm and smooth, it cried out to be eaten!"

"Nature is a word, an allegory, a mold, an embossing, if you will."

"And over your unconsecrated head you'll hear the howling wolves lament their fate and yours the livelong year;"

"The old Paris is no more (the form of a city changes faster, alas! than a mortal's heart)."

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

"Scent, sound or sight, beneficent, malign – Who cares if you’re a blessing or a curse, So long as you bring light,"