“Inspiration comes of working every day.”
“Hypocrite reader -- my fellow -- my brother!”
“Nothing can be done except little by little.”
“The world only goes round by misunderstanding.”
“It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.”
“There is no more steely barb than that of the Infinite.”
“For the merchant, even honesty is a financial speculation.”
“Nature... is nothing but the inner voice of self-interest.”
“A sweetheart is a bottle of wine, a wife is a wine bottle.”
“Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.”
“A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.”
“Any man who does not accept the conditions of human life sells his soul.”
“Any healthy man can go without food for two days -- but not without poetry.”
“Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and calculation.”
“What is exhilarating in bad taste is the aristocratic pleasure of giving offense.”
“There are as many kinds of beauty as there are habitual ways of seeking happiness.”
“The man who says his evening prayer is a captain posting his sentinels. He can sleep.”
“Nearly all our originality comes from the stamp that time impresses upon our sensibility.”
“Evil is done without effort, naturally, it is the working of fate; good is always the product of an art.”
“We all have the republican spirit in our veins, like syphilis in our bones. We are democratized and venerealized.”
“As a remedy against all ills; poverty, sickness, and melancholy only one thing is absolutely necessary; a liking for work.”
“Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.”
“True Civilization does not lie in gas, nor in steam, nor in turn-tables. It lies in the reduction of the traces of original sin.”
“On the day when a young writer corrects his first proof-sheet he is as proud as a schoolboy who has just got his first dose of pox.”
“The more a man cultivates the arts the less he fornicates. A more and more apparent cleavage occurs between the spirit and the brute.”
“The life of our city is rich in poetic and marvelous subjects. We are enveloped and steeped as though in an atmosphere of the marvelous; but we do not notice it.”
“Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet upon the same road, one of them has to give place.”
“The pleasure we derive from the representation of the present is due, not only to the beauty it can be clothed in, but also to its essential quality of being the present.”
“To say the word Romanticism is to say modern art -- that is, intimacy, spirituality, color, aspiration towards the infinite, expressed by every means available to the arts.”
“The cannon thunders... limbs fly in all directions... one can hear the groans of victims and the howling of those performing the sacrifice... it's Humanity in search of happiness.”