"With wine, poetry, or virtue as you choose. But get drunk."

"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!"

"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?"

"Common sense tells us that the things of the earth exist only a little, and that true reality is only in dreams."

"The immense appetite we have for biography comes from a deep-seated sense of equality."

"In order not to feel time's horrid fardel bruise your shoulders, grinding you into the earth, get drunk and stay that way. On what? On wine, poetry, virtue, whatever. But get drunk!"

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"Music fathoms the sky."

"The Devil's hand directs our every move - / the things we loathed become the things we love"

"And, drunk with my own madness, I shouted at him furiously, "Make life beautiful! Make life beautiful!"

"Any healthy man can go without food for two days--but not without poetry."

"So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, be endlessly drunk."

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