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One must work, if not from inclination, at least out of despair — since it proves, on close examination, that work is less boring than amusing oneself.

Charles Baudelaire

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Charles Baudelaire
Age: 46 †
Born: 1821
Born: April 9
Died: 1867
Died: August 30
Art Critic
Author
Essayist
Literary Critic
Poet
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Writer
Paris
France
Baudelaire
Charles Pierre Baudelaire-Dufaÿs
Charles Pierre Baudelaire
Less
Boredom
Must
Boring
Work
Despair
Oneself
Proves
Labor
Amusing
Close
Examination
Least
Inclination
Since
Bores

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From that moment onwards, our loathsome society rushed, like Narcissus, to contemplate its trivial image on a metallic plate. A form of lunacy, an extraordinary fanaticism took hold of these new sun-worshippers.
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Je sais la douleur est la noblesse unique O u' ne mordront jamais la terre et les enfers. I know that pain is the one nobility upon which Hell itself cannot encroach.
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Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.
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Music fathoms the sky.
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The devil's finest trick is to persuade you that he does not exist.
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I am the wound and the knife! I am the slap and the cheek! I am the limbs and the rack, And the victim and the executioner! I am the vampire of my own heart.
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the Devil's hand directs our every move - / the things we loathed become the things we love
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The act of love strongly resembles torture or surgery.
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The Devil pulls the strings which make us dance We find delight in the most loathsome things Some furtherance of Hell each new day brings, And yet we feel no horror in that rank advance.
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It is unfortunately very true that, without leisure and money, love can be no more than an orgy of the common man. Instead of being a sudden impulse full of ardor and reverie, it becomes a distastefully utilitarian affair.
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Nothing can be done except little by little.
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There is a certain cowardice, a certain weakness, rather, among respectable folk. Only brigands are convinced-of what? That they must succeed. And so they do succeed.
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By nature, by necessity itself, [primitive man] is encyclopedic, while civilized man finds himself confined in the infinitely small regions of specialization.
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