“I found I could extinguish all human hope from my soul.”

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.

Morality is the weakness of the mind.

True alchemy lies in this formula: ‘Your memory and your senses are but the nourishment of your creative impulse’.

It began as research. I wrote of silences, of nights, I scribbled the indescribable. I tied down the vertigo.

And from that time on I bathed in the Poem Of the Sea, star-infused and churned into milk, Devouring the green azures; where, entranced in pallid flotsam, A dreaming drowned man sometimes goes down.

What a life! True life is elsewhere. We are not in the world.

I understand, and not knowing how to express myself without pagan words, I’d rather remain silent.

We are all motivated far more than we care to admit by characteristics inherited from our ancestors which individual experiences of childhood can modify, repress, or enhance, but cannot erase.

Don’t work. Avoid telling the truth. Be hated. Love someone.

Ignorance is a blank sheet, on which we may write; but error is a scribbled one, on which we must first erase.

Nothing erases unpleasant thoughts more effectively than conscious concentration on pleasant ones.

One hundred years of joy can be erased in one second.

Long pains, with use of bearing, are half eased.

They hit like waves, the memories of those old summer days. Memories you’d have thought to erase, but they crash ashore without haste.

Religions survive mainly because they brainwash the young.