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

There are in every man, always, two simultaneous allegiances, one to God, the other to Satan. Invocation of God, or Spirituality, is a desire to climb higher; that of Satan, or animality, is delight in descent.

Our squalid society rushed, Narcissus to a man, to gaze on its trivial image on a scrap of metal.

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

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.

To be a great man and a saint for oneself, that is the only important thing.

The vices of man, as full of horror as one might suppose them to be, contain the proof (if in nothing else but their infinitely expandable nature) of his taste for the infinite; only, it is a taste that often takes a wrong turn.

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

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