It is at despair at not being able to be noble and beautiful by natural means that we have made up our faces so strangely. - Charles Baudelaire

There is an invincible taste for prostitution in the heart of man, from which comes his horror of solitude. He wants to be two. The man of genius wants to be one.… It is this horror of solitude, the need to lose oneself in the external flesh, that man nobly calls the need to love.

Être un homme utile m'a paru toujours quelque chose de bien hideux.

The Devil pulls the strings which make us dance;
We find delight in the most loathsome things;
Some furtherance of Hell each new day brings,
And yet we feel no horror in that rank advance.