Great Throughts Treasury

"Destruction: The Demon is stirred constantly by my side floats around me like impalpable air I breathe it and feel it burn my lungs . Filling an everlasting and guilty craving knowing how much I love art, sometimes it takes the shape of the most seductive woman, and special and hypocritical pretexts usually my lips to degrading filters. Out of sight of God, and leads me, panting and got rid of tiredness, the center of the plains of tedium, deep and deserts, and throws before my eyes filled with confusion stained garments, gaping wounds, and bloody apparatus that involves destruction."

"Diving into the gulf, Heaven or Hell, what matter? In The Unknown to find the NEW! (rough translation: Into the abyss - Heaven or Hell, what difference does it make / To the depths of the Unknown to find the NEW!)"

"Do not ever give up on your dreams, memories know nothing of admirable dream of a madman!"

"Do not look for my heart anymore; the beasts have eaten it."

"Do not you the oasis where I dream, and the gourd here I hum long lines the wine of memory?"

"Do you remember the sight we saw, my soul, that soft summer morning round a turning in the path, the disgusting carcass on a bed scattered with stones, its legs in the air like a woman in need burning its wedding poisons like a fountain with its rhythmic sobs, I could hear it clearly flowing with a long murmuring sound, but I touch my body in vain to find the wound. I am the vampire of my own heart, one of the great outcasts condemned to eternal laughter who can no longer smile. Am I dead? I must be dead."

"Don't search any further for my heart; wild beasts ate it."

"Doubt, or the absence of faith and naivet‚, is a vice peculiar to this age, for no one is obedient nowadays; and naivet‚, which means the dominance of temperament in the manner, is a gift from God, possessed by very few."

"Drowsing, they take the noble attitude of a great sphinx, who, in a desert land, sleeps always, dreaming dreams that have no end."

"Each day we take another step to hell, descending through the stench, unhorrified."

"Even if God did not exist, religion would still be holy and divine. God is the only being who, in order to reign, need not even exist."

"Even if it were proven that God didn't exist, Religion would still be Saintly and Divine."

"Even in the centuries which appear to us to be the most monstrous and foolish, the immortal appetite for beauty has always found satisfaction."

"Even when she walks one would believe that she dances."

"Every idea is endowed of itself with immortal life, like a human being. All created form, even that which is created by man, is immortal. For form is independent of matter: molecules do not constitute form."

"Every man who refuses to accept the conditions of life sells his soul."

"Every minute we feel overwhelmed by the idea and the feeling of time. And there are only two resources to escape this nightmare to forget: pleasure and work. We spent pleasure. The work fortifies us. Choose"

"Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself."

"Everything for me becomes allegory."

"Everything that gives pleasure has its reason. To scorn the mobs of those who go astray is not the means to bring them around."

"Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and calculation."

"Everything, alas, is an abyss, ? actions, desires, dreams, words!"

"Evil comes up softly like a flower."

"Evil happens without effort, naturally, inevitably; good is always the product of skill."

"Evil is done without effort, naturally, it is the working of fate; good is always the product of an art."

"Evil is done without effort, naturally, it's destiny; good is always a product of art."

"Exiled on the ground in the midst of jeers."

"Extract the eternal from the ephemeral."

"Finally! And I consent to rest in a bath of darkness. First, double back the bolt. I think this turn of the key is to increase my solitude and fortify the barricades that now separate me from the world."

"Finer than any sand are dusts of gold that gleam, Vague star-points, in the mystic iris of their eyes."

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

"Folly, error, sin, avarice occupy our minds and labor our bodies, and we feed our pleasant remorse as beggars nourish their vermin."

"For each letter received from a creditor, write fifty lines on an extraterrestrial subject and you will be saved."

"For every letter of creditors, write fifty lines on an extraterrestrial subject and you'll be saved."

"For me, Romanticism is the most recent and the most current expression of beauty."

"For the child, lover of maps and prints, the universe equals his huge appetite. Ah, how big is the world in the light of the lamps! What a small world in the eyes of memory!"

"For the merchant, even honesty is a financial speculation."

"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 center 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."

"Forest, I fear you! In my ruined heart your roaring wakens the same agony as in cathedrals when the organ moans and from the depths I hear that I am damned."

"France is not poetic; she even feels, in fact, a congenital horror of poetry. Among the writers who use verse, those whom she will always prefer are the most prosaic."

"Free Man, always adore the sea! The sea is your mirror; you contemplate your soul In the infinite development of its wave, and your spirit is not an abyss less bitter."

"Free man, you will always cherish the sea."

"From his soft fur, golden and brown, Goes out so sweet a scent, one night I might have been embalmed in it By giving him one little pet. He is my household's guardian soul; He judges, he presides, inspires All matters in his royal realm; Might he be fairy? or a god? When my eyes, to this cat I love Drawn as by a magnet's force, Turn tamely back upon that appeal, And when I look within myself, I notice with astonishment The fire of his opal eyes, Clear beacons glowing, living jewels, Taking my measure, steadily."

"From Satan or from God, what matter? Angel or Siren."

"From that moment onwards, our loathsome society rushed, like Narcissus, to contemplate its trivial image on a metallic plate. A form of lunacy, an extraordinary fanaticism took hold of these new sun-worshippers."

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

"Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man's physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed."

"Genius is nothing more or less than childhood recovered by will, a childhood how equipped for self-expression with an adult's capacities."

"Genius is only childhood recovered at will, childhood now gifted to express itself with the faculties of manhood and with the analytic mind that allows him to give order to the heap of unwittingly hoarded material."

"Get drunk. Must always be drunk, everything is there; this is the only question. Not to feel the horrible burden that breaks your shoulders and bows you to the earth, you must get drunk without ceasing. But what? On wine, poetry or virtue as you wish, but get drunk! And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace, on the green grass of a ditch, you wake up, drunkenness already diminished or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock; everything that flees, everything that moans, everything that is moving, everything that sings, everything that speaks, ask what time it is. And the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock will answer you, it is time to get drunk; not to be the martyred slaves of Time, get drunk, get drunk constantly wine, poetry, virtue, as you please."