The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries with terror before being defeated.

An artist is an artist only because of his exquisite sense of beauty, a sense which shows him intoxicating pleasures, but which at the same time implies and contains an equally exquisite sense of all deformities and all disproportion.

I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no Melancholy.

I have cultivated my hysteria with pleasure and terror.

There are women who inspire you with the desire to conquer them and to take your pleasure of them; but this one fills you only with the desire to die slowly beneath her gaze.

Strangeness is a necessary ingredient in beauty.