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Charles Baudelaire Quotes
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Who would dare assign to art the sterile function of imitating nature?
Charles Baudelaire
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The observer is a prince who enjoys his incognito everywhere. The lover of life makes the world his family, just as the lover of the fair sex devises his family from all discovered, discoverable and undiscoverable beauties; as the lover of pictures lives in an enchanted society of painted dreams on canvas.
Charles Baudelaire
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Our squalid society rushed, Narcissus to a man, to gaze at its trivial image on a scrap of metal.
Of photography
Charles Baudelaire
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Go then, a starveling girl With no perfume or pearls, Only your nudity O my beauty!
Charles Baudelaire
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Everything that gives pleasure has its reason. To scorn the mobs of those who go astray is not the means to bring them around.
Charles Baudelaire
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All beauties, like all possible phenomena, have something of the eternal and something of the ephemeral — of the absolute and the particular.
Charles Baudelaire
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Every idea is endowed of itself with immortal life, like a human being. All created form, even that which is created by man, is immortal. For form is independent of matter: molecules do not constitute form.
Charles Baudelaire
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Everything there is simply order and beauty, luxury, peace and sensual indulgence.
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There exist only three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill, to create.
Charles Baudelaire
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There exist certain individuals who are, by nature, given purely to contemplation and are utterly unsuited to action, and who, nevertheless, under a mysterious and unknown impulse, sometimes act with a speed which they themselves would have thought beyond them.
Charles Baudelaire
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Above my cradle loomed the bookcase where/ Latin ashes and the dust of Greece/ mingled with novels, history, and verse/ in one dark Babel. I was folio-high/ when I first heard the voices.
Charles Baudelaire
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O Death, old captain, it is time! raise the anchor!
Charles Baudelaire
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To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.
Charles Baudelaire
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To be wicked is never excusable, but there is some merit in knowing that you are; the most irreparable of vices is to do evil from stupidity.
Charles Baudelaire
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There are moments of existence when time and space are more profound, and the awareness of existence is immensely heightened.
Charles Baudelaire
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I have cultivated my hysteria with delight and terror. Now I suffer continually from vertigo, and today, 23rd of January, 1862, I have received a singular warning, I have felt the wind of the wing of madness pass over me.
Charles Baudelaire
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Be always drunken. Nothing else matters: that is the only question. If you would not feel the horrible burden of time weighing on your shoulders and crushing you to the earth, be drunken continually.
Charles Baudelaire
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To be a great man and a saint for oneself, that is the one important thing.
Charles Baudelaire
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If the word doesn't exist, invent it; but first be sure it doesn't exist.
Charles Baudelaire
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Perhaps it would be sweet to be, in turn, both victim and executioner.
Charles Baudelaire
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Dandyism is the last spark of heroism amid decadence.
Charles Baudelaire
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Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony.
Charles Baudelaire
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The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist shrieks with terror before being overcome.
Charles Baudelaire
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The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be himself and others, as he wishes.
Charles Baudelaire
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The poet is like the prince of the clouds
Who haunts the tempest and laughs at the archer;
Exiled on the ground in the midst of jeers,
His giant wings prevent him from walking.
Charles Baudelaire
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Quote of the day
We owe something to extravagance, for thrift and adventure seldom go hand in hand.
Lady Randolph Churchill
Charles Baudelaire
Creative Commons
Born:
April 9, 1821
Died:
August 31, 1867
(aged 46)
Bio:
Charles Pierre Baudelaire was a French poet who also produced notable work as an essayist, art critic, and pioneering translator of Edgar Allan Poe.
Known for:
Les Fleurs du mal (1857)
Le Spleen de Paris (1855)
The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays
Les Paradis artificiels (1860)
La Fanfarlo (1847)
Most used words:
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Charles Baudelaire on Wikipedia
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