In this respect you, unworthy companion of my sad life, resemble the public, to whom one must never present the delicate scents that only exasperate … - Charles Baudelaire

All beauties, like all possible phenomena, have something of the eternal and something of the ephemeral — of the absolute and the particular.

Mais qu'importe l'éternité de la damnation à qui a trouvé dans une seconde l'infini de la jouissance!

It is imagination that has taught man the moral sense of color, of contour, of sound and of scent. It created, in the beginning of the world, analogy and metaphor. It disassembles creation, and with materials gathered and arranged by rules whose origin is only to be found in the very depths of the soul, it creates a new world, it produces the sensation of the new. As it has created the world (this can be said, I believe, even in the religious sense), it is just that it should govern it.