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
Modernity is the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, which make up one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immutable. This transitory fugitive element, which is constantly changing, must not be despised or neglected. – Charles Baudelaire
Any healthy man can go without food for two days — but not without poetry. – Charles Baudelaire
In this horror of solitude, this need to lose his ego in exterior flesh, which man calls grandly the need for love. – Charles Baudelaire
It is the will of God and Nature that these mortal bodies be laid aside, when the soul is to enter into real life; ’tis rather an embrio state, a preparation for living; a man is not completely born until he be dead: Why then should we grieve that a new child is born among the immortals? – Benjamin Franklin, 22 February 1756