Charles Baudelaire Quotes
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The soul is a thing so impalpable, so often useless, and sometimes so embarrassing that at this loss I felt only a little more emotion than if, during a walk, I had lost my visiting card.
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I consider it useless and tedious to represent what exists, because nothing that exists satisfies me. Nature is ugly, and I prefer the monsters of my fancy to what is positively trivial.
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Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet upon the same road, one of them has to give place.
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What is art? Prostitution.
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It is by universal misunderstanding that all agree. For if, by ill luck, people understood each other, they would never agree.
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It would be difficult for me not to conclude that the most perfect type of masculine beauty is Satan, as portrayed by Milton.
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Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and calculation.
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Le Poète est semblable au prince des nuéesQui hante la tempête et se rit de l’archer ;Exilé sur le sol au milieu des huées,Ses ailes de géant l’empêchent de marcher.
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A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors.
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Our religion is itself profoundly sad - a religion of universal anguish, and one which, because of its very catholicity, grants full liberty to the individual and asks no better than to be celebrated in each man's own language - so long as he knows anguish and is a painter.
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Music fathoms the sky.
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The life of our city is rich in poetic and marvelous subjects. We are enveloped and steeped as though in an atmosphere of the marvelous; but we do not notice it.
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A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.
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To be a great man and a saint for oneself, that is the only important thing.
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Là, tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté,Luxe, calme et volupté.
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If the poet has pursued a moral objective, he has diminished his poetic force.
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Even in the centuries which appear to us to be the most monstrous and foolish, the immortal appetite for beauty has always found satisfaction.
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Ne pouvant supprimer l'amour, l'Église a voulu au moins le désinfecter, et elle a fait le mariage.
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La femme ne sait pas séparer l'âme du corps.
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I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no Melancholy.
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But a dandy can never be a vulgar man.
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La plus belle des ruses du diable est de vous persuader qu'il n'existe pas.
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La femme est naturelle, c'est-à-dire abominable.
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We are weighed down, every moment, by the conception and the sensation of Time. And there are but two means of escaping and forgetting this nightmare: pleasure and work. Pleasure consumes us. Work strengthens us. Let us choose.