As the end of the century approaches, all our culture is like flies at the beginning of winter. Having lost their agility, dreamy and demented, they turn slowly about the window in the first icy mists of morning,…then they fall down the curtains. – Charles Baudelaire
I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no Melancholy. – 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
Any healthy man can go without food for two days — but not without poetry. – Charles Baudelaire
What culture lacks is the taste for anonymous, innumerable germination. Culture is smitten with counting and measuring; it feels out of place and uncomfortable with the innumerable; its efforts tend, on the contrary, to limit the numbers in all domains; it tries to count on its fingers. – Jean Dubuffet