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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
Men
Like
Baudelaire
Spite
Families
Nations
Great

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Who among us has not dreamt, in moments of ambition, of the miracle of a poetic prose, musical without rhythm and rhyme, supple and staccato enough to adapt to the lyrical stirrings of the soul, the undulations of dreams, and sudden leaps of consciousness.
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A book is a garden, a party, a company by the way.
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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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On the day when a young writer corrects his first proof-sheet he is as proud as a schoolboy who has just got his first dose of pox.
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I am bored in France because everyone resembles Voltaire.
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Unable to suppress love, the Church wanted at least to disinfect it, and it created marriage.
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My soul travels on the smell of perfume like the souls of other men on music.
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The dance can reveal everything mysterious that is hidden in music, and it has the additional merit of being human and palpable. Dancing is poetry with arms and legs.
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However incoherent a human existence may be, human unity is not bothered by it.
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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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A friend of mine, the most innocuous dreamer who ever lived, once set a forest on fire to see, as he said, if it would catch as easily as people said. The first ten times the experiment was a failure but on the eleventh it succeeded all too well.
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Common sense tells us that the things of the earth exist only a little, and that true reality is only in dreams.
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An artist is only an artist on condition that he neglects no aspect of his dual nature. This dualism is the power of being oneself and someone else at one and the same time.
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Color... thinks by itself, independently of the object it clothes.
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What men call love is a very small, restricted, feeble thing compared with this ineffable orgy, this divine prostitution of the soul giving itself entire, all its poetry and all its charity, to the unexpected as it comes along, to the stranger as he passes.
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We are all born marked for evil.
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I have to confess that I had gambled on my soul and lost it with heroic insouciance and lightness of touch. The soul is so impalpable, so often useless, and sometimes such a nuisance, that I felt no more emotion on losing it than if, on a stroll, I had mislaid my visiting card.
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Life swarms with innocent monsters.
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I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no Melancholy.
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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.
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