"I do not know what evil is when it comes to art. I only know what is good art and what is bad art."

"My father's right to shape my life had been taken from him by the same being who gave his own life meaning"

"If everybody who had brains and doubts left Orthodoxy, we would be in a great deal of trouble."

"I walked the streets and tasted the golden sun that lay across the city."

"An artist is a person first."

"It’s not a pretty world, Papa.” “I’ve noticed,” my father said softly."

"An artist has got to get acquainted with himself just as much as he can. It is no easy job, for it is not a present-day habit of humanity."

"A man must be forced to choose. It is only when you are forced to choose that you know what is important to you."

"They are so rigid,' he said in a sudden angry voice. 'Why do they not see that this rigidity turns away our greatest minds?"

"Always be a poet, even in prose."

"One should always be drunk. That's all that matters...But with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you chose. But get drunk."

"Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recaptured at will."

"A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors."

"Remembering is only a new form of suffering."

"The beautiful is always bizarre."

"If the word doesn't exist, invent it; but first be sure it doesn't exist."

"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."

"I have cultivated my hysteria with pleasure and terror."

"There are women who inspire you with the desire to conquer them and to take your pleasure of them; but this one fills you only with the desire to die slowly beneath her gaze."

"Strangeness is a necessary ingredient in beauty."

"Life has but one true charm: the charm of the game. But what if we’re indifferent to whether we win or lose?"

"Extract the eternal from the ephemeral."

"What can an eternity of damnation matter to someone who has felt, if only for a second, the infinity of delight?"

"The Devil pulls the strings which make us dance; We find delight in the most loathsome things; Some furtherance of Hell each new day brings, And yet we feel no horror in that rank advance."

"I am a cemetery by the moon unblessed."

"I am unable to understand how a man of honor could take a newspaper in his hands without a shudder of disgust."

"A multitude of small delights constitute happiness"

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

"Evil is committed without effort, naturally, fatally; goodness is always the product of some art."

"You walk on corpses, beauty, undismayed."

"He who looks through an open window sees fewer things than he who looks through a closed window."

"The Poet is a kinsman in the clouds Who scoffs at archers, loves a stormy day; But on the ground, among the hooting crowds, He cannot walk, his wings are in the way."

"My heart is lost; the beasts have eaten it."

"I have felt the wind on the wing of madness."

"I set out to discover the why of it, and to transform my pleasure into knowledge."

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

"I should like the fields tinged with red, the rivers yellow and the trees painted blue. Nature has no imagination."

"Let us beware of common folk, common sense, sentiment, inspiration, and the obvious."

"The insatiable thirst for everything which lies beyond, & which life reveals is the most living proof of our immortality."

"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!"

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

"It is the hour to be drunken! To escape being the martyred slaves of time, be ceaselessly drunk. On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish."

"Inspiration comes of working every day."

"It always seems to me that I should feel well in the place where I am not."

"An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom."

"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."

"Through the Unknown, we'll find the New"

"All which is beautiful and noble is the result of reason and calculation."

"Unable to suppress love, the Church wanted at least to disinfect it, and it created marriage."

"Nothing is as tedious as the limping days, When snowdrifts yearly cover all the ways, And ennui, sour fruit of incurious gloom, Assumes control of fate’s immortal loom"