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Like those great sphinxes lounging through eternity in noble attitudes upon the desert sand, they gaze incuriously at nothing, calm and wise.

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
Noble
Lounging
Eternity
Sphinx
Attitude
Gaze
Wise
Attitudes
Upon
Sand
Nothing
Desert
Great
Cat
Like
Calm

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There are but three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the warrior and the poet. To know, to kill and to create. The rest of mankind may be taxed and drudged, they are born for the stable, that is to say, to practise what they call professions.
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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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Even when she walks one would believe that she dances.
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Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony.
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I am bored in France because everyone resembles Voltaire.
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If a given combination of trees, mountains, water, and houses, say a landscape, is beautiful, it is not so by itself, but because of me, of my favor, of the idea or feeling I attach to it.
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There exist only three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill, to create.
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Comme l'imagination a cre e le monde, elle le gouverne. Because imagination created the world, it governs it.
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What do I care if you are good? Be beautiful! and be sad!
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Life is a hospital in which every patient is possessed by a desire to change his bed.
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A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors.
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There are in every man, always, two simultaneous allegiances, one to God, the other to Satan. Invocation of God, or Spirituality, is a desire to climb higher that of Satan, or animality, is delight in descent.
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Everything, alas, is an abyss, — actions, desires, dreams, words!
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It is one of the prodigious privileges of art that the horrific, artistically expressed, becomes beauty, and that sorrow, given rhythm and cadence, fills the spirit with a calm joy.
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Even if it were proven that God didn't exist, Religion would still be Saintly and Divine.
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The dandy should aspire to be uninterruptedly sublime. He should live and sleep in front of a mirror.
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The immense profundity of thought in vulgar locutions, like holes dug by generations of ants.
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The life of our city is rich in poetic and marvelous subjects. We are enveloped and steeped as though in an atmosphere of the marvelous but we do not notice it.
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If the poet has pursued a moral objective, he has diminished his poetic force.
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Nature is a temple, where the living Columns sometimes breathe confusing speech Man walks within these groves of symbols, each Of which regards him as a kindred thing.
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