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The artist must manage to make posterity believe that he never existed.

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Human life is a sad show, undoubtedly; ugly, heavy and complex. Art has no other end, for people of feeling than to conjure away the burden and bitter...more

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The public wants work which flatters its illusions.

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If you participate in life, you don’t see it clearly: you suffer from it too much or enjoy it too much. The artist, to my way of thinking, is a monstr...more

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Art requires neither complaisance nor politeness; nothing but faith, faith and freedom.

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Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois so that you may be violent and original in your work.

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You don’t make art out of good intentions.

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I am an obscure and patient pearl-fisherman who dives into the deepest waters and comes up with empty hands and a blue face. Some fatal attraction dra...more

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As humanity perfects itself, man becomes degraded. When everything is reduced to the mere counter-balancing of economic interests, what room will ther...more

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The morality of art consists, for everyone, in the side that flatters its own interests. People do not like literature.

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If there is on earth, and among all these things of nothing, a belief worthy of adoration, if there is anything holy, pure and sublime, anything answe...more