There exist only three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill, to create. – Charles Baudelaire
It is the hour to be drunken! to escape being the martyred slaves of time, be ceaselessly drunk. On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish. – Charles Baudelaire
The more a man cultivates the arts the less he fornicates. A more and more apparent cleavage occurs between the spirit and the brute. – Charles Baudelaire
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
The obscurest sayings of the truly great are often those which contain the germ of the profoundest and most useful truths. Genius rapidly traverses the living present to bury itself in the deepest mysteries of the universe; often making the grandest discoveries at a single glance. – Joseph Mazzini