Great Throughts Treasury

"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."

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

"And the least stupid, fleeing the herd where fate has penned them fast, take refuge in the wards of opium, so much for what is news around the world."

"And the lamp having at last resigned itself to death. There was nothing now but firelight in the room, And every time a flame uttered a gasp for breath It flushed her amber skin with the blood of its bloom."

"Angel full of gaiety, do you know anguish, shame, remorse, sobs, trouble, and the vague terrors of those frightful nights that compress the heart like a paper one crumples? Angel full of gaiety, do you know anguish?"

"Ant-swarming city, city abounding in dreams, where ghosts in broad daylight accost the passerby!"

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

"Any man who does not accept the conditions of human life sells his soul."

"Any newspaper, from the first line to the last, is nothing but a web of horrors, I cannot understand how an innocent hand can touch a newspaper without convulsing in disgust."

"Any sentence must be in itself a well-coordinated monument, all of these monuments forming the city that is the book."

"Anybody, providing he knows how to be amusing, has the right to talk about himself."

"Art is an infinitely precious good, a draught both refreshing and cheering which restores the stomach and the mind to the natural equilibrium of the ideal."

"Artist should look at the reality and brutality of modern life in all its color, nature with all its imperfections - that should be the challenge to the modern painter not the didactic idealization of the past. The new generation should forge a new path."

"As a small child, I felt in my heart two contradictory feelings, the horror of life and the ecstasy of life."

"As for techniques and processes, as seen in the works themselves, neither public nor artists will find anything about them here. Those things are learned in the studio and the public is interested only in the results."

"As the end of the century approaches, all our culture is like flies at the beginning of winter. Having lost their agility, dreamy and demented, they turn slowly about the window in the first icy mists of morning? [then] they fall down the curtains."

"Ascend beyond the sickly atmosphere to a higher plane, and purify yourself by drinking as if it were ambrosia the fire that fills and fuels Emptiness. Free from the futile strivings and the cares which dim existence to a realm of mist, happy is he who wings an upward way on mighty pinions to the fields of light; whose thoughts like larks spontaneously rise into the morning sky; whose flight, unchecked, outreaches life and readily comprehends the language of flowers and of all mute things."

"Astonishing travelers! How many noble stories we read in your eyes as deep as lar sea! Show us in case of your rich memories those admirable jewelry made ??of stars and ethers. We wish to travel without steam and without candles! To enliven the tedium of our cells, cause that our souls stretched like sails, pass your memories rimmed horizons. Tell us, what have you seen?"

"Be Drunken, Always. That is the point; nothing else matters. If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time weigh you down and crush you to the earth, be drunken continually. Drunken with what? With wine, with poetry or with virtue, as you please. But be drunken. And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace, or on the green grass in a ditch, or in the dreary solitude of your own room, you should awaken and find the drunkenness half or entirely gone, ask of the wind, of the wave, of the star, of the bird, of the clock, of all that flies, of all that speaks, ask what hour it is; and wind, wave, star, bird, or clock will answer you: It is the hour to be drunken! Be Drunken, if you would not be the martyred slaves of Time; be drunken continually! With wine, with poetry or with virtue, as you please."

"Beauty is always weird."

"Beauty is the sole ambition, the exclusive goal of Taste."

"Because imagination created the world, it governs it."

"Being a useful man has always seemed to me to be something truly hideous."

"Belief in progress is a doctrine of idlers and Belgians. It is the individual relying upon his neighbors to do his work."

"Bella I, O mortals !, like a dream of stone, And my breast, which all turn to torture, was made ??to inspire the poet a love as my stuff, immortal and quiet."

"Beware of all the paradoxical in love. It is simplicity which saves; it is simplicity which brings happiness... Love should be love."

"Bitter is the knowledge gained in traveling."

"Blessed art Thou, Lord, who giveth suffering as a divine remedy for our impurities."

"Both ardent lovers and austere scholars, when once they come to the years of discretion, love cats, so strong and gentle, the pride of the household, who like them are sensitive to the cold, and sedentary."

"But a dandy can never be a vulgar man."

"But how you'd please me, night! without those stars whose light speaks in a language I have known! Since I seek for the black, the blank, the bare!"

"But the true voyagers are only those who leave Just to be leaving; hearts light, like balloons, They never turn aside from their fatality and without knowing why they always say: "Let's go!?"

"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?"

"But what the eternity of damnation to that found in a second infinity of enjoyment!"

"By nature, by necessity itself, [primitive man] is encyclopedic, while civilized man finds himself confined in the infinitely small regions of specialization."

"Cats, so strong and gentle, the pride of the household."

"Caution makes love at first look impossible."

"Certainly this man, such as I have described him, this loner who is gifted with an active imagination, traversing forever the vast desert of men, has a loftier aim than that of a simple idler, an aim more general than the passing pleasure of circumstance. He is looking for what one might be allowed to call modernity; for no better word presents itself to express the idea in question. What concerns him is to release the poetry of fashion from its historical trappings, to draw the eternal out of the transient."

"Color... thinks by itself, independently of the object it clothes."

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

"Conceive a canvas for a lyrical fairytale or buffoonery, for a pantomime, and translate it into a novel serious. Drown everything in an abnormal and dreamy atmosphere, - in the atmosphere of the great days. - It must be something soothing, - even in Its serene passion. - Regions of Pure Poetry ."

"Cute My dog, good dog, beloved pooch, come and see breathe an excellent perfume, bought in the best perfume of the city. And the dog, tail wagging, sign, I think, that these beings petty corresponds to laughing and smiling, and puts approaches curious wet nose into the bottle uncapped; then, leaning back with sudden fear, he barks me, as if I reconviniera. Ah wretch can! If I had offered a pile of excrement all you had ferreted out with delight, maybe devouring them. So you, unworthy companion of my sad life, you look to the public, who has never been to offer delicate perfumes that exasperate him, but carefully chosen garbage."

"Dance can reveal everything mysterious that is hidden in music"

"Dancing can reveal all the mystery that music conceals."

"Dandyism is not even, as many unthinking people seem to suppose, an immoderate interest in staff and equipment elegance appearance. For the true dandy these things are only a symbol of the aristocratic superiority of his personality ... What, then, is this ruling passion has turned into a that creed and created its own skilled tyrants? What is this unwritten constitution that has created a caste so haughty? It is, to bone all, a burning need to acquire originality, within the bounds of convention apparent, it's is a sort of cult of oneself, which can even dispense with what are commonly called illusions. It is the delight in causing astonishment, and the proud satisfaction of never being astonished oneself."

"Dandyism is the last flicker of heroism in decadent ages... Dandyism is a setting sun; like the declining star, it is magnificent, without heat and full of melancholy. But alas! The rising tide of democracy, which spreads everywhere and reduces everything to the same level, is daily carrying away these last champions of human pride, and submerging, in the waters of oblivion, the last traces of these remarkable myrmidons."

"Death, old admiral, up anchor now."

"Delacroix , Wagner , Baudelaire all great theorists, bent on dominating other minds by sensuous means. Their one dream was to create the irresistible effect to intoxicate, or overwhelm. They looked to analysis to provide them with the keyboard on which to play, with certainty, on man's emotions, and they sought in abstract meditation they key to sure and certain action upon their subject man's nervous and psychic being."

"Delacroix was passionately in love with passion, and coldly determined to seek the means of expressing passion in the most visible manner. In this dual character, be it said in passing, we find the two distinguishing marks of the most substantial geniuses, extreme geniuses."

"Desire of pleasure binds us to the present."