“Once, if I remember well, my life was a feast where all hearts opened and all wines flowed.”

What is my nothingness to the stupor that awaits you?

Come from forever, and you will go everywhere.

Faith assuages, guides, restores.

Life is the farce we are all forced to endure.

The wolf howled under the leaves And spit out the prettiest feathers Of his meal of fowl: Like him I consume myself.

Weakness or strength: you exist, that is strength. You don’t know where you are going or why you are going, go in everywhere, answer everyone. No one will kill you, any more than if you were a corpse.

Idle youth, enslaved to everything; by being too sensitive I have wasted my life.

I am the slave of my baptism. Parents, you have caused my misfortune, and you have caused your own.

Eternity. It is the sea mingled with the sun.

Genius is the recovery of childhood at will.

Yet this is the watch by night. Let us all accept new strength, and real tenderness. And at dawn, armed with glowing patience, we will enter the cities of glory.

Life is the farce which everyone has to perform.

It is wrong to say: I think. One ought to say: I am thought. I is someone else.

Oh! If only we were naked now, and free to watch our protruding parts align; To whisper – both of us – in ecstasy!

Romanticism has never been properly judged. Who was there to judge it? The critics!

In the great glasshouses streaming with condensation, the children in mourning-dress beheld marvels.