“How convenient it is to declare that everything is totally ugly within the habit of the époque, rather than applying oneself to extract from it the dark and cryptic beauty, however faint and invisible it is.”

“The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist”—Charles Baudelaire “The second greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he is the good guy”—Ken Ammi”

“To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.”

“The beautiful is always bizarre.”

“To be away from home and yet find oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet remain hidden from the world.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet upon the same road, one of them has to give place.”

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

“Modernity is the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, which make up one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immutable. This transitory fugitive element, which is constantly changing, must not be despised or neglected.”