If an addict who has been completely cured starts smoking again he no longer experiences the discomfort of his first addiction. There exists, therefore, outside alkaloids and habit, a sense for opium, an intangible habit which lives on, despite the recasting of the organism. The dead drug leaves a ghost behind. At certain hours it haunts the house.
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Mystery has its own mysteries, and there are gods above gods. We have ours, they have theirs. That is what's known as infinity.
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Man seeks to escape himself in myth, and does so by any means at his disposal. Drugs, alcohol, or lies. Unable to withdraw into himself, he disguises himself. Lies and inaccuracy give him a few moments of comfort.
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All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it.
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A car can massage organs which no masseur can reach. It is the one remedy for the disorders of the great sympathetic nervous system.
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Art produces ugly things which frequently become more beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time.
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The instinct of nearly all societies is to lock up anybody who is truly free. First, society begins by trying to beat you up. If this fails, they try to poison you. If this fails too, they finish by loading honors on your head.
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I know that poetry is indispensable, but to what I could not say.
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Art is science made clear.
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I believe in luck: how else can you explain the success of those you dislike?
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Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving. It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death.
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The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.
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Life is a horizontal fall.
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If a hermit lives in a state of ecstasy, his lack of comfort becomes the height of comfort. He must relinquish it.
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Mirrors should reflect a little before throwing back images.
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We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don't like
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The actual tragedies of life bear no relation to one's preconceived ideas. In the event, one is always bewildered by their simplicity, their grandeur of design, and by that element of the bizzare which seems inherent in them.
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The extreme limit of wisdom--that is what the public calls madness.
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The Louver is a morgue; you go there to identify your friends.
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The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.
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Such is the role of poetry. It unveils, in the strict sense of the word. It lays bare, under a light which shakes off torpor, the surprising things which surround us and which our senses record mechanically.
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An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original.
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Take a commonplace, clean it and polish it, light it so that it produces the same effect of youth and freshness and originality and spontaneity as it did originally, and you have done a poet's job. The rest is literature.
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The extreme limit of wisdom-- that is what the public calls madness.
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The joy of youth is to disobey; but the trouble is that there are no longer any orders.
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The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood.
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Nothing ever gets anywhere. The earth keeps turning round and round and gets nowhere. The moment is the only thing that counts.
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Tact is knowing how far to go too far.
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It is not I who become addicted, it is my body.
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Poetry is indispensable --if I only knew what for.
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