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Nations, like families, have great men only in spite of themselves.

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
Translator
Writer
Paris
France
Baudelaire
Charles Pierre Baudelaire-Dufaÿs
Charles Pierre Baudelaire
Like
Baudelaire
Spite
Families
Nations
Great
Men

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It is time to get drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of Time, get drunk get drunk without stopping! On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.
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The world only goes round by misunderstanding.
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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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It is good sometimes that the happy of this world should learn, were it only to humble their foolish pride for an instant, that there are higher, wider, and rarer joys than theirs.
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Those men get along best with women who can get along best without them.
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Everything, alas, is an abyss, — actions, desires, dreams, words!
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Through the Unknown, we'll find the New
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The People adore authority.
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Our religion is itself profoundly sad - a religion of universal anguish, and one which, because of its very catholicity, grants full liberty to the individual and asks no better than to be celebrated in each man's own language - so long as he knows anguish and is a painter.
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Being a useful man has always seemed to me to be something truly hideous.
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Where are the dogs going? you people who pay so little attention ask. They are going about their business. And they are very punctilious, without wallets, notes, and without briefcases.
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Doubt, or the absence of faith and naivete, is a vice peculiar to this age, for no one is obedient nowadays and naivete, which means the dominance of temperament in the manner, is a gift from God, possessed by very few.
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Love is a taste for prostitution. In fact, there is no noble pleasure that cannot be reduced to Prostitution.
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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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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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How bittersweet it is, on winter's night, To listen, by the sputtering, smoking fire, As distant memories, through the fog-dimmed light, Rise, to the muffled chime of churchbell choir.
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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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We are all born marked for evil.
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To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.
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Nations, like families, have great men only in spite of themselves. They do everything in their power not to have any. And therefore, the great man, in order to exist, must possess a force of attack which is greater than the force of resistance developed by millions of people.
Charles Baudelaire