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

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It would perhaps be nice to be alternately the victim and the executioner.
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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.
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Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recaptured at will.
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Everything for me becomes allegory
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Blessed art Thou, Lord, who giveth suffering As a divine remedy for our impurities.
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The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries out in terror before he is defeated.
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What can an eternity of damnation matter to someone who has felt, if only for a second, the infinity of delight?
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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.
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An artist is an artist only because of his exquisite sense of beauty, a sense which shows him intoxicating pleasures, but which at the same time implies and contains an equally exquisite sense of all deformities and all disproportion.
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One should always be drunk. That's all that matters...But with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you chose. But get drunk.
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France at the dinner table in faraway places but here, among ourselves, in the family, let us face the facts: France is not poetic to tell the truth, she even feels a congenital horror of poetry. Among the writers who use verse, those whom she will always prefer are the most prosaic.
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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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The immense profundity of thought in vulgar locutions, like holes dug by generations of ants.
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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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In the domain of painting and statuary, the present-day credo of the worldly wise, especially in France, is this: ... I believe that art is, and can only be, the exact reproduction of nature... An avenging God has heard the prayers of this multitude Daguerre was his messiah.
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What do I care if you are good? Be beautiful! and be sad!
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The cannon thunders... limbs fly in all directions... one can hear the groans of victims and the howling of those performing the sacrifice... it's Humanity in search of happiness.
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A work of art should be like a well-planned crime.
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Artist should look at the reality and brutality of modern life in all its color, nature with all its imperfections - that should be the challenge to the modern painter not the didactic idealization of the past. The new generation should forge a new path.
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All the visible universe is nothing but a shop of images and signs.
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