There is nothing to be found in human eyes, and that is their terrifying and dolorous enigma, their abominable and delusive charm. There is nothing but that which we put there ourselves. That is why honest gazes are only to be found in portraits. The faded and weary eyes of martyrs, expressions tortured by ecstasy, imploring and suffering eyes, some resigned, others desperate.. the gazes of saints, mendicants and princesses in exile, with pardoning smiles.. the gazes of the possessed, the chosen and the hysterical.. and sometimes of little girls, the eyes of Ophelia and Canidia, the eyes of virgins and witches.. as you live in the museums, what eternal life, dolorous and intense, shines out of you! Like precious stones enshrined between the painted eyelids of masterpieces, you disturb us across time and across space, receivers of the dream which created you! You have souls, but they are those of the artists who wished you into being, and I am delivered to despair and mortification because I have drunk the draught of poison congealed in the irises of your eyes. The eyes of portraits ought to be plucked out. Jean Lorrain
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More Quotes By Jean Lorrain
  1. There is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves.
  2. The world does not speak. Only we do. The world can, once we have programmed ourselves with a language, cause us to hold beliefs. But it cannot propose a language for us to speak. Only other human beings can do that.
  3. Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with.
  4. My sense of the holy is bound up with the hope that some day my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law.
  5. I now wish that I had spent somewhat more of my life with verse. This is not because I fear having missed out on truths that are incapable of statement in prose. There are no such truths; there is nothing about death that Swinburne and...
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