Among men, only the poet, the priest and the soldier are great.
The man who sings, the man who sacrifices and sacrifices himself.
The rest are made for the whip.
Let us distrust the people, common sense, the heart, inspiration and the obvious.
I have always been astonished that women were allowed to enter churches. What conversation can they have with God?
The eternal Venus (caprice, hysteria, fancy) is one of the devil’s seductive forms.
The day a young writer corrects his first printer’s proof, he is as proud as a schoolboy who has just caught his first case of syphilis.
Do not forget a substantial chapter on the art of divination by water, cards, inspection of the hand, etc...
Woman cannot separate the soul from the body. She is simplistic, like the animals. — A satirist would say that this is because she has only a body.
A chapter on the Toilette.
The morality of the toilette, the pleasures of the toilette.
On pedantry.
On professors,
judges,
priests
and ministers.
The fine great men of the day.
Renan.
Feydeau.
Octave Feuillet.
Scholl.
Newspaper directors, François Buloz, Houssaye, Rouy, Girardin, Texier, de Calonne, Solar, Turgan, Dalloz.
List of scoundrels, Solar at the head.
To be a great man and a saint for oneself, that is the only thing that matters.
Nadar is the most astonishing expression of vitality. Adrien told me that his brother Félix had all his internal organs in duplicate. I was jealous of him when I saw him succeed so well in everything that is not abstract.
Veuillot is so coarse and so hostile to the arts that one would think all the democracy in the world had taken refuge in his breast.
Development of the portrait. Supremacy of the pure idea in the Christian as in the Babouvist communist.
Fanaticism of humility. Not even to aspire to understand religion.
Music.
On slavery.
On society women.
On prostitutes.
On judges.
On the sacraments.
The man of letters is the enemy of the world.
On bureaucrats.
In love, as in almost all human affairs, cordial understanding is the result of a misunderstanding. This misunderstanding is pleasure. The man cries: O my angel! The woman coos: Mama! mama! And these two fools are convinced that they think in unison. — The unbridgeable gulf that makes communication impossible remains unbridged.
Why is the sight of the sea so infinitely and so eternally pleasing?
Because the sea offers the idea of immensity and movement at once. Six or seven leagues represent for man the radius of infinity. Here is a diminutive infinity. What does it matter, if it is enough to suggest the idea of infinity as a whole? Twelve or fourteen leagues of liquid in motion are enough to give the highest idea of beauty offered to man in his transient dwelling.
Nothing on earth is interesting except religions.
What is universal religion (Chateaubriand, de Maistre, the Alexandrians, Capé)?
There is a universal religion made for the alchemists of thought, a religion that emerges from man, considered as a divine compendium.
Saint-Marc Girardin has made a remark that will endure: ‘Let us be mediocre!’
Let us set this remark beside Robespierre’s: ‘Those who do not believe in the immortality of their being pass a just judgment on themselves.’
Saint-Marc Girardin’s remark implies an immense hatred of the sublime.
Anyone who has seen Saint-Marc Girardin walking in the street has immediately conceived the image of a large goose, infatuated with itself, but terrified and running along the highway ahead of the stagecoach.
Theory of true civilization. It lies neither in gas, nor in steam, nor in table turning. It lies in the diminution of the traces of original sin.
Nomadic peoples, herders, hunters, farming peoples and even cannibals can all be superior in energy and personal dignity to our Western races.