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
I am unable to understand how a man of honor could take a newspaper in his hands without a shudder of disgust. – Charles Baudelaire
Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with mans physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed. – Charles Baudelaire
Modernity signifies the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art of which the other half is the eternal and the immutable. – Charles Baudelaire