“One must never explain symbols. One must never penetrate them. He who has drawn the symbol has hidden a truth inside it, but he must not reveal it, or else why symbolize it in the first place?”

Pierre Louÿs, 1895

“Louder than a normal voice, a voice announces accidents, the temperature and declaims a chronicle or a story. Nothing is more bizarre than hearing the thousand phonographs under the arcades. Each of the “stations” carries a sign indicating the nature of the recitations. The lovers of news stop under the Voice of Events; people fond of literature sup tea under the Voice of the Poets. Those who like to relive ancient times drink within range of the Voice of India, the Voice of Rome or the Voice of Greece. The marine murmur of those confused voices causes a kind of anguish.”

Paul Adam, 1897

“I was about to finish—or near enough—The Fall of the House of Usher, but the illness has blown out my hopes. It’s obviously of little importance on Aldebaran or Sirius whether I write music or not, but I don’t like being contradicted and I take this twist of destiny very hard.”

Claude Debussy, 1916

“Naturalists tell us that the eyes of certain animals, particularly ruminants, possess a vision that magnifies things considerably. It is that perception, on a multiple scale, that earns humankind its sovereignty. That reign by optics is one of the most admirable foresights of the harmonist of worlds. It is also that visual exaggeration that cattle must enjoy, to the point of the total stupefaction, in watching trains go past, magnified for them to the measure of enormous mountains in motion.”

Henri Austruy 1925

 

“The time has come when, under the influence of Mars, millions of men are about to kill one another, hatefully, at a distance. Charnel houses will be displayed under the sun, and that star will cause a destructive atom to bloom pitilessly. It will kill as many millions by means of the infinitely small as by the gigantic engines of war.”

Odette Dulac, 1926

 

“In a time like ours, when the genius of engineers has reached such undreamed of proportions, one can hear famous pieces of music as easily as one can buy a glass of beer. It only costs ten centimes, too, just like automatic weighing scales! Should we not fear this domestication of sound, this magic preserved in a disc that anyone can awaken at will? Will it not mean a diminution of the secret forces of art, which until now have been considered indestructible?”

Claude Debussy, 1913

 

“The soul, once free from its body, escapes into the atmosphere, whose electric streams carry it here and there, and whose many-shaped inhabitants it begins to perceive, like fugitive flashes in a thick mist. 

“Then there begins a desperate, vertiginous struggle on the part of the soul, which is still dull and heavy, to rise into the upper strata of the air, to free itself from earthly attraction and reach, in the heaven of our planetary system, the region proper to it and which friendly guides alone can show it. The Greek initiates identified it with the cone of shadow which the earth is always trailing behind it, which shadow reaches as far as the moon; for this reason they called it the Abyss of Hecate. In these murky depths, say the disciples of Orpheus and of Pythagoras, are tossed to and fro the souls which make desperate efforts to reach the circle of the moon, though the violence of the winds beats them back to earth by thousands.”

Édouard Schuré, 1906

 

“'What! You don’t know about the chambardoscope—an instrument invented by an Irish Priest?' None of the ladies or gentlemen was familiar with the chambardoscope. Laflemme brought out his famous old nickel watch. 'It’s not very complicated, as you can see. The instrument is rather reminiscent of a watch, with the difference that it only has one needle. The interior comprises an apparatus that’s extremely sensitive to electric currents passing through the ground. Its use is very simple. You place the instrument flat, like this. If the needle stays on the number six, there’s nothing to fear. If it inclines to the right of the six, it’s because one is dealing with positive telluric currents. If, on the other hand, it steers to the left, that announces the presence of negative currents, which are more dangerous.' All eyes were fixed attentively on the needle, which stayed impassively on the number six. 'We can sleep easy,' Laflemme concluded, cheerfully.”

Alphonse Allais, 1902

 

“'Do not believe, my dear sister, that I wander about in search of adventure and trouble the harmony of the stars. God has traced my path like he has yours, and if my course appears uncertain and wandering, it is because your rays do not extend far enough to be able to embrace the contour of the ellipse which was given to me as my career. My flaming hair is the beacon of God; I am the messenger of the suns, and I dip into their fires in order to share them along my route with young worlds who do not yet have enough warmth and with aging stars who are cold in their solitude. If I tire in my long voyages, if I have a less graceful beauty than yours, if my finery is less virginal, I am nonetheless, like you, a noble daughter of the heavens.'

“After finishing her speech, the comet shakes her mane, protects herself with her ardent shield, and dives into infinite space, where she seems to disappear forever.”

Eliphas Levi, 1854

 

“All that she has revealed to me of her mysterious studies is that she has seen, with her own eyes, plans of aircraft, submarines and automobiles dating back fifteen thousand years before Jesus Christ. She claims that writing has been lost three times on the earth. Thought-reading, which marks one of the phases of human evolution, has existed before. However, arts of speech and writing then became useless, and the spoken word and the pen became obsolete. Fortunately for the loquacious, and for poets, the universal silence of humanity is always followed by the fatal cataclysm that accompanies the somersault of the being known as the Earth, hindered by its growth in its cocoon of humus. Flic, floc! A wave from the depths inundates the continents…and everything begins all over again...”

Odette Dulac, 1926

 

“Finally, the last scene: Humanity is celebrating its salvation with a grand fête that is unfurling through the Champ-de-Mars, transformed into a flower-garden. The cordial and pompous atmosphere of old is reborn. Orpheus is culminating on a throne, surrounded by the masters of occultism. In the air, the souls of disincarnate adepts form choirs. Up above, the sign of the absolute, the universal pentacle of Martinism, is shining like a sun.”

Willy, 1900

 

“The sea, this afternoon, is quite ordinary, uniformly and extensively dark green; it is an endless enchainment of white foam lighting up, going out, lighting up again, it is a legion of sheep swimming, drowning, bobbing up again, and never arriving, until they are ambushed by darkness.” 

Jules Laforgue, 1887

 

“Don’t put Arkel in the trunk! He doesn’t like it.”

Claude Debussy, 1915

 

“Music represents the maximum of vibrations in matter before it turns into light. In the perpetual effort of subtilization, which comes out of the bowels of the earth and takes on its surface the various aspects of minerals, vegetables, animals, sentiments and thoughts, music is at the summit of man's sentiment and intelligence. As matter in vibration, it masks the last limit between thought and fire. Music is the grand ardent halo of the invisible but sonorous flame that is the human will. In the hierarchy of 'densities' of matter, it represents the beginning of fire, just as the sentiment that follows sensation represents the beginning of thought.”

Riciotto Canudo 1911

 

“‘Long live the crocodile! Honor and homage to the crocodile!’

“Either because the crocodile had partisans in the audience or the magic of its words operated naturally, some of the spectators were indeed heard repeating those final words: ‘Long live the crocodile! Honor and homage to the crocodile!’ A few members of the audience were even seen to bow down, as if to worship it, and a colossal altar suddenly formed in front of it. At the same time, a head even more colossal formed at the summit.”

Louis-Claude de Saint Martin, 1798

 

“My art is my prayer.”

Richard Wagner, 1868

 

“Richard Wagner and his works represent a great sum of occult power.”

Rudolf Steiner, 1908

 

“There should be in the world a centre of scientific and philosophical research, where the most notable scholars, in possession of new ideas, could readily experiment the value of the hypotheses constructed either by themselves or by their disciples. A centre from which nothing would drive away the good will. A centre wherein a world record could be kept of the entire range of the progressive imagination of man, and where nothing usefully conceived by the human brain would be lost. A centre from which economic and practical knowledge would flow to all parts of the world. A centre and a city outside of all historical and social quarrels, of all economic and national rivalries, a centre belonging, without possible exception, to all. To the Spirit of all. To the Spirit only.”

Paul Adam, 1893

 

“Wagner was one of the masters of Symbolism; his conception of art, his philosophy, his very formula were at the origin of Symbolism. It was impossible to get to the bottom of Wagnerism without encountering Symbolism; that is to say, it was impossible to expound the Wagnerian conception without recognizing in it the doctrine, or at least one of the primordial elements, of the new poetic doctrine.”

Édouard Dujardin, 1936

 

“Remember that a picture, before being a battle horse, a nude, an anecdote or whatnot, is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order.”

Maurice Denis, 1890