For the merchant, even honesty is a financial speculation. – 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
The whole visible universe is but a storehouse of images and signs to which the imagination will give a relative place and value; it is a sort of pasture which the imagination must digest and transform. – Charles Baudelaire
In literature as in ethics, there is danger, as well as glory, in being subtle. Aristocracy isolates us. – Charles Baudelaire