“Perfect and unpredictable beings will offer themselves for your experiments.”

Arthur Rimbaud, 1875

“For this science, said the masses, nothing is impossible: she commands the elements, knows the language of the celestial bodies, and directs the progress of the stars; the dead rise in their tombs and articulate with fatal words the wind of the night that whistles in their skulls.”

Éliphas Lévi, 1856

“The poet will be a poet only if he is by nature initiated into the analogies which make up the universe: Symbolism is a mystical doctrine.”

Louis Laloy, 1905

 

“Every work of art should come to a point or summit, like a pyramid, or else the light should strike one spot on a sphere.” 

Gustav Flaubert, 1857

“Debussy once asked me rather naively if I consorted with the composers of my own country; and without waiting for an answer told me that he did not consort with the composers of France.”

Cyril Scott, 1933

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“Never shall I forget the impression made upon me by Debussy's thick-set figure, the huge greenish, almost Moorish face beneath the dense thicket of black hair, and the obscure dreaming eyes that seemed to be peering through me at some object behind my back. As he lumbered vaguely forward, extending a cushioned hand, he looked like some Triton arisen from ‘the glaucous caverns of Old Ocean. ‘A mythological survival!’ I said to myself.”  

Arnold Bax, 1921

 

“We live in a very strange era, in which we want to say everything, know everything, publish everything. When will there be respect for us and for our mystery?”

Claude Debussy, 1912

 

“What artist could not be tempted by the piquant enigma of a human being who became a flower?”

Jean Lorrain, 1909

“Would not one suppose that the curved line and the spiral pay their court to the straight line, and twine about it in a mute adoration? Would not one say that all these delicate corollæ, all these calices, explosions of odours and colours, execute a mystical dance around the hieratic staff?”

Charles Baudelaire, 1869

“So, Monsieur, it’s toward the zone of the sirens that we’re steering?”

Maurice Renard, 1933

“Look at that flower. It hides a marvelous secret in its calyx. The perfume that evaporates from it does not diminish by its intensity the mystery enclosed in its heart. Here, it is the symbol of joy.”

Victor-Émile Michelet, 1900

 

“The Germans! Ouf! Everything with them is en gros. A theme must be long, regardless of its contents or value; the longer the better. Then another interminable episode and then another endless theme. Then, after sixteen quarts of beer, they begin a development so long, so long, that there is scarcely room in this house to hold it. Take, for instance, the symphonies of Mahler with its thousand voices and whips, submarines and whatnot. Or Monsieur Strauss, who is clever in that he knows how to write nothingness itself.” 

Claude Debussy, 1913

 

“The dark stranger now began to speak of the true craft of song in very extraordinary language, which itself almost sounded like strange songs hitherto unheard.” 

E.T.A. Hoffmann, 1819

 

“Any sounds in any combination and in any succession are henceforth free to be used in a musical continuity."

Claude Debussy, 1893

 

“As everybody knows, one never sees the sun in one’s dreams, even though one is often aware of a light far more luminous.”

Gérard de Nerval, 1853

 

“Creation is composed of an infinite number of universes, separated from one another by abysms of nothingness, and the world is only a portal by means of which errant souls are precipitated into glory and become stars in their turn. Eternity is endless and the number of universes is similarly unlimited. To the right and left, on high and down below, everything vibrates, everything palpitates, everything exists, and always progressing, because you cannot only take a single step forward.”

Jane de La Vaudère, 1893

"Who is this suspicious ‘person’ with no head? I asked myself. A symbol of course, what else! But what did the symbol want to tell me? That disaster was approaching, I sensed."

Gustav Meyrink, 1927

 

"Is this another hallucination?" I queried. 

"No; it is a reality. Let us advance to the brink." 

John Uri Lloyd, 1895

“Behind the veil of all the hieratic and mystical allegories of ancient doctrines, behind the darkness and strange ordeals of all initiations, under the seal of all sacred writings, in the ruins of Nineveh or Thebes, on the crumbling stones of old temples, there are found indications of a doctrine which is everywhere the same and everywhere carefully concealed.”

Éliphas Lévi, 1854

“Enjoy the good country air while you may. Here it is foul and pestilential. And the streets are swarming with provincials trailing bewildered wives and squalling brats behind them–all with their noses in the air, gaping at the rooftops and spelling out the names of the streets. The need for a little wholesale slaughter becomes evident. Anyway, what the blazes do they want here, all these people?”

J-k Huysmans, 1912