quotes from classic

The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries with terror before being defeated.

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As a remedy against all ills; poverty, sickness, and melancholy only one thing is absolutely necessary; a liking for work.

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The man who, from the beginning of his life, has been bathed at length in the soft atmosphere of a woman, in the smell of her hands, of her bo...

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As the end of the century approaches, all our culture is like flies at the beginning of winter. Having lost their agility, dreamy and demented, they turn slowly about the window in the first icy mists of morning,...then they fall down the curtains.

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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.

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It is one of the prodigious privileges of art that the horrific, artistically expressed, becomes beauty, and that sorrow, given rhythm and cad...

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Drawing is a struggle between nature and the artist, in which the better the artist understands the intentions of nature, the more easily he w...

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The artist is today and has been for many years, despite his absence of merit, simply a spoiled child. So many honors, so much money bestowed ...

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An artist is an artist only because of his exquisite sense of beauty, a sense which shows him intoxicating pleasures, but which at the same ti...

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The old Paris is no more (the form of a city changes faster, alas! than a mortal's heart).

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Alas, human vices, however horrible one might imagine them to be, contain the proof (were it only in their infinite expansion) of man's longing for the infinite; but it is a longing that often takes the wrong route. It is my belief that the reason behind all culpable excesses lies in this depravation of the sense of the infinite.

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

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Often, while contemplating works of art, not in their easily perceptible materiality, in the too-clear hieroglyphs of their contours or the ob...

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The whole visible universe is but a storehouse of images and signs to which the imagination will give a relative place and value; it is a sort of pasture which the imagination must digest and transform.

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I have to confess that I had gambled on my soul and lost it with heroic insouciance and lightness of touch. The soul is so impalpable, so often useless, and sometimes such a nuisance, that I felt no more emotion on losing it than if, on a stroll, I had mislaid my visiting card.

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What is exhilarating in bad taste is the aristocratic pleasure of giving offense.

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In literature as in ethics, there is danger, as well as glory, in being subtle. Aristocracy isolates us.

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We all have the republican spirit in our veins, like syphilis in our bones. We are democratized and venerealized.

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Nearly all our originality comes from the stamp that time impresses upon our sensibility.

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It is more noble by silence to avoid an injury than by argument to overcome it.

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