For me, a poet is someone who is ‘in contact.’ Someone through whom a current is passing.

Sobre todo, no se enamora uno de quien se le parece.

This Second Century appeals to me because it was the last century, for a very long period of time, in which men could think and express themselves with full freedom. As for us, we are perhaps already very far from such times as that.

Rien ne m’explique : mes vices et mes vertus n’y suffisent absolument pas ; mon bonheur le fait davantage.

Of all our games, love’s play is the only one which threatens to unsettle the soul, and is also the only one in which the player has to abandon himself to the body’s ecstasy.

Leaving behind books is even more beautiful – there are far too many children.

Is the soul only the supreme development of the body, the fragile evidence of the pain and pleasure of existing? Is it, on the contrary more ancient than the body, which is modeled on its image and which serves it momentarily, more or less well, as instrument?

I will not fall. I have reached the center. I listen to the striking of who knows what divine clock through the thin carnal wall of a life full of blood, of shudderings, and of breathings. I am near the mysterious kernel of things as one is sometimes near a heart at night.

I did not love less; indeed I loved more. But the weight of love, like that of an arm thrown tenderly across a chest, becomes little by little too heavy to bear.

I have no children, nor is that a regret. To be sure, in time of weakness and fatigue, when one lacks the courage of one’s convictions, I have sometimes reproached myself for not having taken the precaution to engender a son, to follow me. But such a vain regret rests upon two hypotheses, equally doubtful: first, that a son necessarily continues us, and second, that the strange mixture of good and evil, that mass of minute and odd particularities which make up a person, deserves continuation.