Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I seek and don’t find myself. I belong to chrysanthemum hours, neatly lined up in flowerpots.
I’m losing my taste for everything, including even my taste for finding everything tasteless.
And, like the great damned souls, I shall always feel that thinking is worth more than living.
It is noble to be shy, illustrious not to know how to act, great not to have a gift for living.
pg 9, "The consciousness of life's unconsciousness is the oldest tax levied on the intelligence.
The end is low, like all quantitative ends, personal or not, and it can be attained and verified.
Time, which grays hair and wrinkles faces, also withers violent affections, and much more quickly.
Life is what we make of it. Travel is the traveler. What we see isn't what we see but what we are.
Let's absurdify life, from east to west. Let us play hide-and-seek with our consciousness of living.
I don't mourn the loss of my childhood; I mourn because everything, including (my) childhood, is lost.
Only sterility is noble and dignified. Only killing what never was is elevated and perverse and absurd.
Whenever someone tells me he dreamed, I wonder if he realizes that he has never done anything but dream.
Between me and life is a faint glass. No matter how sharply I see and understand life, I cannot touch it.
There are those that even God exploits, and they are prophets and saints in the vacuousness of the world.
Smell is a strange sight. It evokes sentimental landscapes through a sudden sketching of the subconscious.
Everyone has his vanity, and each one's vanity is his forgetting that there are others with an equal soul.
I never was but an isolated bon vivant, which is absurd; or a mystic bon vivant, which is an impossible thing.
Why is art beautiful? Because it's useless. Why is life ugly? Because it's all ends and purposes and intentions.
The world belongs to who doesn't feel. The primary condition to be a practical man is the absence of sensitivity.
The Gods sell when they give. Glory is paid for with disgrace. Poor are the happy, for they are Just what passes.
The end of lower art is to please, the end of average art is to raise the top, the end of superior art is to free.
To think is to destroy. The very process of thought indicates it for the same thought, as thinking is decomposing.
I never cared about whatever tragic event happened in China. It's faraway decoration, even if in blood and plague.
To have opinions is to sell out to youself. To have no opinions is to exist. To have every opinion is to be a poet.
We never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It's our own concept—our own selves—that we love.
I will be what I want. But I will have to want what I'll be. Success is in having success, not conditions for success.
But I am not perfect in my way of putting things Because I lack the divine simplicity Of being only what I appear to be.
Being a retired major looks like an ideal thing to me. What a pity you couldn't eternally have been just a retired major.
The poet is a pretender. / He pretends so completely, / that he even pretends that it is pain / the pain he really feels.
Lord, may the pain be ours, And the weakness that it brings, But at least give us the strength, Of not showing it to anyone!
If I write what I feel, it's to reduce the fever of feeling. What I confess is unimportant, because everything is unimportant.
Decadence is the total loss of unconsciousness, which is the very basis of life. Could it think, the heart would stop beating.
This world is for those who are born to conquer it, Not for those who dream that are able to conquer it, even if they're right.
I am tired of myself in every way. All things, deep down to the secret of their roots, are stained by the color of my weariness.
All pleasure is a vice, for seeking pleasure is what everybody does in life, and the only dark vice is doing what everybody does.
I am nothing. I'll never be anything. I couldn't want to be something. Apart from that, I have in me all the dreams in the world.
We live by action—by acting on desire. Those of us who don't know how to want—whether geniuses or beggars—are related by impotence.
I think of life as an inn where I have to stay until the abyss coach arrives. I don't know where it will take me, for I know nothing.
Never having discovered qualities in myself which could attract someone else, I could never believe that anyone felt attracted to me.
I'm upset by the happiness of all these men who don't know they're unhappy. Because of that, though, I love them all. Dear vegetables!
I've never done anything but dream. This, and this alone, has been the meaning of my life. My only real concern has been my inner life.
We worship perfection because we can't have it; if we had it, we would reject it. Perfection is inhuman, because humanity is imperfect.
Your poems are of interest to mankind; your liver isn't. Drink till you write well and feel sick. Bless your poems and be damned to you.
To love is to tire of being alone; it is therefore a cowardice, a betrayal of ourselves. (It is exceedingly important that we not love.)
...the painful intensity of my sensations, even when they're happy ones; the blissful intensity of my sensations, even when they're sad.
All that I've lived I've forgotten, as if I'd vaguely heard it. All that I'll be reminds me of nothing, as if I'd lived and forgotten it.
I search and can't find myself. I belong in chrysanthemum time, sharp in calla lily elongations. God made my soul into an ornamental thing.
What Hells and Purgatories and Heavens I have inside of me! But who sees me do anything that disagrees with life--me, so calm and peaceful?
In any spirit that isn't deformed there is the belief in God. In any spirit that is not deformed there isn't the belief in a particular God.
For valuing your own suffering sets on it the gold of a sun of pride. Suffering a lot can originate the illusion of being the Chosen of Pain.