Inspiring Quotes by Charles Baudelaire - Page 2

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"The lover of life makes the whole world into his family, just as the lover of the fair sex creates his from all the lovely women he has found, from those that could be found, and those who are impossible to find"

"But a dandy can never be a vulgar man"

"Any newspaper, from the first line to the last, is nothing but a web of horrors, I cannot understand how an innocent hand can touch a newspaper without convulsing in disgust"

"It would perhaps be nice to be alternately the victim and the executioner"

"I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no Melancholy"

"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"

"Always be a poet, even in prose"

"What is exhilarating in bad taste is the aristocratic pleasure of giving offense"

"To say the word Romanticism is to say modern art - that is, intimacy, spirituality, color, aspiration towards the infinite, expressed by every means available to the arts"

"The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be himself and others, as he wishes"

"In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men"

"Hypocrite reader my fellow my brother!"

"God is the only being who, in order to reign, doesn't even need to exist"

"Genius is childhood recalled at will"

"Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry"

"What is art? Prostitution"

"We are weighed down, every moment, by the conception and the sensation of Time. And there are but two means of escaping and forgetting this nightmare: pleasure and work. Pleasure consumes us. Work strengthens us. Let us choose"

"The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries with terror before being defeated"

"Nearly all our originality comes from the stamp that time impresses upon our sensibility"

"Anybody, providing he knows how to be amusing, has the right to talk about himself"

"An artist is an artist only because of his exquisite sense of beauty, a sense which shows him intoxicating pleasures, but which at the same time implies and contains an equally exquisite sense of all deformities and all disproportion"

"There exist only three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill, to create"

"Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet upon the same road, one of them has to give place"

"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"

"I love Wagner, but the music I prefer is that of a cat hung up by its tail outside a window and trying to stick to the panes of glass with its claws"

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