Quote

I sit in the sky like a sphinx misunderstood My heart of snow is wed to the whiteness of swans I hate the movement that displaces the rigid lines, With lips untaught neither tears nor laughter do I know.

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
Heart
Lips
Untaught
Like
Sky
Displaces
Laughter
Sphinx
Neither
Whiteness
Tears
Swans
Movement
Rigid
Lines
Misunderstood
Hate
Snow

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And, drunk with my own madness, I shouted at him furiously, Make life beautiful! Make life beautiful!
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The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be himself and others, as he wishes.
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An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom.
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The more a man cultivates the arts the less he fornicates. A more and more apparent cleavage occurs between the spirit and the brute.
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I think I would be happy in that place I happen not to be, and this question of moving house is the subject of a perpetual dialogue I have with my soul.
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...an industry which can furnish results identical to nature must be the absolute in art.
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Even as a child I felt in my heart two opposite emotions: the horror of life and the ecstasy of life.
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Genius is simply childhood, rediscovered by an act of will.
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In this horror of solitude, this need to lose his ego in exterior flesh, which man calls grandly the need for love.
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The habit of doing one's duty drives away fear.
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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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We are all born marked for evil.
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The world only goes round by misunderstanding.
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Today I felt pass over me A breath of wind from the wings of madness.
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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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A silent mouth is sweet to hear.
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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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