“In our corruption we perceive beauties unrevealed to ancient times.”

“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.”

“It's time, Old Captain, lift anchor, sink!The land rots; we shall sail into the night;if now the sky and sea are black as inkour hearts, as you must know, are filled with light.Only when we drink poison are we well —we want, this fire so burns our brain tissue,to drown in the abyss — heaven or hell,who cares? Through the unknown, we'll find the new. ("Le Voyage")”

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

“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.”

“What strange phenomena we find in a great city, all we need do is stroll about with our eyes open. Life swarms with innocent monsters.”

“It is this admirable, this immortal, instinctive sense of beauty that leads us to look upon the spectacle of this world as a glimpse, a correspondence with heaven. Our unquenchable thirst for all that lies beyond, and that life reveals, is the liveliest proof of our immortality. It is both by poetry and through poetry, by music and through music, that the soul dimly descries the splendours beyond the tomb; and when an exquisite poem brings tears to our eyes, those tears are not a proof of overabundant joy: they bear witness rather to an impatient melancholy, a clamant demand by our nerves, our nature, exiled in imperfection, which would fain enter into immediate possession, while still on this earth, of a revealed paradise.”