In literature as in ethics, there is danger, as well as glory, in being subtle. Aristocracy isolates us. – Charles Baudelaire
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
In this horror of solitude, this need to lose his ego in exterior flesh, which man calls grandly the need for love. – 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
A just thinker will allow full swing to his scepticism. I dip my pen in the blackest ink, because I am not afraid of falling into my inkpot…. We are of different opinions at different hours, but we always may be said to be at heart on the side of truth. – Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Worship,” The Conduct of Life, 1860