Quotes by Théophile Gautier

“To love is to admire with the heart to admire is to love with the mind. ”

“Chance is the pseudonym of God when he did not want to sign.”

“The cat is a dilettante in fur.”

“I was born to travel and write verse.”

“Art is beauty, the perpetual invention of detail, the choice of words, the exquisite care of execution.”

“It is difficult to obtain the friendship of a cat. It is a philosophical animal... one that does not place its affections thoughtlessly.”

“Le hasard, c'est peut-être le pseudonyme de Dieu quand il ne veut pas signer.”

“The years I have squandered in puerile excitement, in going hither and thither, in seeking to force nature and time, I ought to have spent in solitude and meditation, in endeavoring to make myself ...”

“Whatever may have been said of the satiety of pleasure and of the disgust which usually follows passion, any man who has anything of a heart and who is not wretchedly and hopelessly blasé feels his...”

“I have kept thee long in waiting, dear Romuald, and thou mayst well have thought that I had forgotten thee. But I have come from a long distance and from a place from which no one has ever before r...”

“Demander à la poésie du sentimentalisme ... ce n'est pas ça. Des mots rayonnants, des mots de lumière ... avec un rythme et une musique, voilà ce que c'est, la poésie.”

“I had never been into society; for me the world was the enclosure of the college and the seminary. I had a vague knowledge that there was a something called woman, but I never dwelt upon the subjec...”

“I have often been charged with falsehood and hypocrisy, yet there lives not the man who would more gladly than I speak truthfully and lay bare his heart; but as I have not one idea, one feeling in ...”

“To be beautiful, handsome, means that you possess a power which makes all smile upon and welcome you; that everybody is impressed in your favor and inclined to be of your opinion; that you have onl...”

“Nothing is really beautiful unless it is useless; everything useful is ugly, for it expresses a need, and the needs of man are ignoble and disgusting, like his poor weak nature. The most useful pla...”

“This apparent hurly-burly and disorder turn out, after all, to reproduce real life with its fantastic ways more accurately than the most carefully studied out drama of manners. Every man is in hims...”

“Some centuries ago they had Raphael and Michael Angelo; now we have Mr. Paul Delaroche, and all because we are progre”

“For Art alone is great:The bust survives the state, The crown the potentate.”

“Those horses must have been Spanish jennets, born of mares mated with a zephyr; for they went as swiftly as the wind, and the moon, which had risen at our departure to give us light, rolled through...”

“What constitutes the pleasure of the traveler is the obstacle, the fatigue, the peril itself. What pleasure can there be in an excursion where one is always sure of arriving, finding ready horses, ...”