Charles Baudelaire Quotes
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Love is very similar to torture or a surgical operation. Even if the two lovers are very much in love and culminating in mutual desires, one of the two will always be fuller than the other. This one is the operator, the butcher; the other, subjected, the victim.
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To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.
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Un soir, l'âme du vin chantait dans les bouteilles:'Homme, vers toi je pousse, ô cher déshérité,Sous ma prison de verre et mes cires vermeilles.'
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Any man who does not accept the conditions of life sells his soul.
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Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man's physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed.
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Let us beware of common folk, of common sense, of sentiment, of inspiration, and of the obvious.
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For each letter received from a creditor, write fifty lines on an extraterrestrial subject and you will be saved.
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The unique and supreme voluptuousness of love lies in the certainty of committing evil. And men and women know from birth that in evil is found all sensual delight.
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Être un homme utile m'a paru toujours quelque chose de bien hideux.
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The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be himself and others, as he wishes.
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What is exhilarating in bad taste is the aristocratic pleasure of giving offense.
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Modernity signifies the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art of which the other half is the eternal and the immutable.
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If rape and poison, dagger and burning, have still not embroidered their pleasant designs on the banal canvas of our pitiable destinies, it’s because our souls, alas, are not bold enough!
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Evil is done without effort, naturally, it is the working of fate; good is always the product of an art.
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There is no sweeter pleasure than to surprise a man by giving him more than he hopes for.
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To the solemn graves, near a lonely cemetery, my heart like a muffled drum is beating funeral marches.
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There are as many kinds of beauty as there are habitual ways of seeking happiness.
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Soon we shall plunge into the cold darkness; Farewell, vivid brightness of our short-lived summers!
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Common sense tells us that the things of the earth exist only a little, and that true reality is only in dreams.
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The lover of life makes the whole world into his family, just as the lover of the fair sex creates his from all the lovely women he has found, from those that could be found, and those who are impossible to find.
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Hypocrite reader my fellow my brother!
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J'ai toujours été étonné qu'on laissât les femmes entrer dans les églises. Quelle conversation peuvent-elles avoir avec Dieu?
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The insatiable thirst for everything which lies beyond, and which life reveals, is the most living proof of our immortality.
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Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony.