Top 68 Theophile Gautier Quotes
#1. Only that which serves no end is beautiful; everything useful is ugly.
Theophile Gautier
#2. Here a few poor and stunted flowers stood with drooping heads, like a convent of consumptive girls, waiting for a ray of sunlight to dry out their leaves already half-rotten with the damp.
Theophile Gautier
#3. You do not become a critic until it has been completely established to your own satisfaction that you cannot be a poet.
Theophile Gautier
#4. 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 the sky like a wheel detached from its carriage ...
Theophile Gautier
#5. To love is to admire with the heart; to admire is to love with the mind.
Theophile Gautier
#6. Yes, the work comes out more beautiful from a material that resists the process, verse, marble, onyx, or enamel.
Theophile Gautier
#8. For Art alone is great:
The bust survives the state,
The crown the potentate.
Theophile Gautier
#9. Brevity never fatigues; therefore, brevity is always a welcome guest.
Theophile Gautier
#10. Art is beauty, the perpetual invention of detail, the choice of words, the exquisite care of execution.
Theophile Gautier
#11. The most fitting occupation for a civilized man is to do nothing.
Theophile Gautier
#12. Yes, I have loved as none in the world ever loved - with an insensate and furious passion - so violent that I am astonished it did not cause my heart to burst asunder. Ah, what nights - what nights!
Theophile Gautier
#14. White men should exhibit the same insensibility to moral tortures that red men do to physical torments.
Theophile Gautier
#15. Fortune loves to give bedroom slippers to people with wooden legs, and gloves to those with no hands.
Theophile Gautier
#17. Sometimes he will sit on the carpet in front of you, looking at you with eyes so melting, so caressing and so human, that they almost frighten you, for it is impossible to believe that a soul is not there.
Theophile Gautier
#18. Critical lice are like body lice, which desert corpses to seek the living.
Theophile Gautier
#19. There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats.
Theophile Gautier
#23. Nothing is truly beautiful unless it cannot be used for anything; everything that is useful is ugly because it is the expression of some need, and those of man are ignoble and disgusting, like his poor and infirm nature.
Theophile Gautier
#24. [Great artists] do not copy what they see, but what they desire.
Theophile Gautier
#25. And then again, I am no longer quite such a good-looking young fellow that tapestries leap off the wall in my honour.
Theophile Gautier
#26. And of a Sunday swarm the folk
Under the honeysuckle vine,
Quaffing, the while they talk and smoke,
The sun, the melody, the wine.
Theophile Gautier
#27. The word poet literally means maker: anything which is not well made doesn't exist.
Theophile Gautier
#28. To extract beauty from one's own milieu is one of the most difficult tasks of art.
Theophile Gautier
#29. If thou wilt be mine, I shall make thee happier than God Himself in His paradise. The angels themselves will be jealous of thee. Tear off that funeral shroud in which thou about to wrap thyself. I am Beauty, I am Youth, I am Life. Come to me! Together we shall be Love.
Theophile Gautier
#31. Our busy age does not always have time to read, but it always has time to look.
Theophile Gautier
#32. The cat makes himself the companion of your hours of solitude, melancholy and toil.
Theophile Gautier
#33. There is nothing truly beautiful but that which can never be of any use whatsoever; everything useful is ugly, for it is the expression of some need, and man's needs are ignoble and disgusting like his own poor and infirm nature. The most useful place in a house is the water-closet.
Theophile Gautier
#34. Who can believe that there is no soul behind those luminous eyes?
Theophile Gautier
#35. It is a difficult matter to gain the affection of a cat. He is a philosophical, methodical animal, tenacious of his own habits, fond of order and neatness, and disinclined to extravagant sentiment. He will be your friend, if he finds you worthy of friendship, but not your slave.
Theophile Gautier
#36. Pleasure has turned into passion much more quickly than I should ever have thought possible.
Theophile Gautier
#37. Tear up that funeral shroud - you are going to smother yourself in it. I am beauty, I am youth, I am life - come to me, and together we will be Love itself ... Our life together will flow by like a dream, and it will be as one perpetual kiss.
Theophile Gautier
#38. What well-bred woman would refuse her heart to a man who had just saved her life? Not one; and gratitude is a short cut which speedily leads to love.
Theophile Gautier
#39. I longed to be able to gather my whole life-force into a single impulse, and transmit it to her and blow into her frozen remains the fire that was consuming me.
Theophile Gautier
#41. The public, which has been wrong before and is wrong now, can accept only demons and angels on the stage
Theophile Gautier
#42. The very essence of ballet is poetic, deriving from dreams rather than from reality. About the only reason for its existence is to enable us to remain in the world of fantasy and escape from the people we rub shoulders with in the street. Ballets are the dreams of poets taken seriously.
Theophile Gautier
#43. Sometimes he sits at your feet looking into your face with an expression so gentle and caressing that the depth of his gaze startles you.
Theophile Gautier
#44. With all women gentleness is the most persuasive and powerful argument.
Theophile Gautier
#45. Good heavens! what a foolish thing is this pretended perfectibility of the human race which is continually being dinned into our ears!
Theophile Gautier
#48. [A cat] will lie the whole evening on your knee, purring and happy in your society ...
Theophile Gautier
#51. Pleasure has turned into habit much more quickly thn I should have ever thought possible.
Theophile Gautier
#53. Chance is perhaps the pseudonym of God when he does not want to sign.
Theophile Gautier
#55. The purity of a person's heart can be quickly measured by how they regard animals
Theophile Gautier
#56. Any man who does not have his inner world to translate is not an artist.
Theophile Gautier
#57. If you are worthy of its affection, a cat will be your friend but never your slave.
Theophile Gautier
#59. Literature has nothing to do with usefulness; the most useful place in any house is the toilet.
Theophile Gautier
#60. It is difficult to obtain the friendship of a cat. It is a philosophical animal ... one that does not place its affections thoughtlessly.
Theophile Gautier
#61. [A cat] will make itself the companion of your hours of work, of loneliness, or of sadness.
Theophile Gautier
#63. Things perish. Gods have passed.
But song sublimely cast
Shall citadels outlast.
Theophile Gautier
#64. 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 worthy of being loved.
Theophile Gautier
#65. Yes, I have loved, as no one on earth ever loved, with an insensate and furious love, so violent that I wonder it did not break my heart.
Theophile Gautier
#66. The arts teach and moralise by their beauty alone, not by translating a philosophical or social formula. For the truly artistic person, painting has itself as it's purpose, which is quite enough.
Theophile Gautier
#67. 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 place in a house is the lavatory.
Theophile Gautier
#68. It may well be that the pictures of Courbet, Manet, Monet and their like contain beauties which escape the notice of such old romantic heads as ours, already streaked with silver threads.
Theophile Gautier
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