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Quotes by

Charles Baudelaire

All fashions are charming, or rather relatively charming, each one being a new striving, more or less well conceived, after beauty, an approximate statement of an ideal, the desire for which constantly teases the unsatisfied human mind. – Charles Baudelaire

The cannon thunders… limbs fly in all directions… one can hear the groans of victims and the howling of those performing the sacrifice… its Humanity in search of happiness. – Charles Baudelaire

There are in every man, always, two simultaneous allegiances, one to God, the other to Satan. Invocation of God, or Spirituality, is a desire to climb higher; that of Satan, or animality, is delight in descent. – Charles Baudelaire

There exist certain individuals who are, by nature, given purely to contemplation and are utterly unsuited to action, and who, nevertheless, under a mysterious and unknown impulse, sometimes act with a speed which they themselves would have thought beyond them. – Charles Baudelaire

The poet is like the prince of clouds
Who haunts the tempest and laughs at the archer;
Exiled on the ground in the midst of jeers,
His giant wings prevent him from walking. – Charles Baudelaire

We all have the republican spirit in our veins, like syphilis in our bones. We are democratized and venerealized. – Charles Baudelaire

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he doesnt exist – Charles Baudelaire

To be just, that is to say, to justify its existence, criticism should be partial, passionate and political, that is to say, written from an exclusive point of view, but a point of view that opens up the widest horizons. – Charles Baudelaire

The more a man cultivates the arts the less he fornicates. A more and more apparent cleavage occurs between the spirit and the brute. – Charles Baudelaire

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 mans own language – so long as he knows anguish and is a painter. – Charles Baudelaire

Even if it were proven that God didnt exist, Religion would still be Saintly and Divine. – Charles Baudelaire

Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself. – Charles Baudelaire

There exist only three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill, to create. – Charles Baudelaire

It is time to get drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of Time, get drunk get drunk without stopping! On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish. – Charles Baudelaire

It is the hour to be drunken! to escape being the martyred slaves of time, be ceaselessly drunk. On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish. – Charles Baudelaire

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. – Charles Baudelaire

France is not poetic she even feels, in fact, a congenital horror of poetry. Among the writers who use verse, those whom she will always prefer are the most prosaic. – Charles Baudelaire

Nature… is nothing but the inner voice of self-interest. – Charles Baudelaire

Nature is a temple in which living columns sometimes emit confused words. Man approaches it through forests of symbols, which observe him with familiar glances. – Charles Baudelaire

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. – Charles Baudelaire