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There is a word, in a verb, something sacred which forbids us from using it recklessly. To handle a language cunningly is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.

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
Language
Sorcery
Kind
Verb
Something
Verbs
Handle
Using
Cunningly
Sacred
Recklessly
Practice
Evocative
Word
Forbids

More quotes by Charles Baudelaire

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What I say is that the supreme and singular joy of making love resides in the certainty of doing evil.
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Man loves man so much that when he flees the city, it is still to seek the crowd, that is, to rebuild the city in the country.
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You walk on corpses, beauty, undismayed.
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As the end of the century approaches, all our culture is like flies at the beginning of winter. Having lost their agility, dreamy and demented, they turn slowly about the window in the first icy mists of morning, . . . [then] they fall down the curtains.
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A silent mouth is sweet to hear.
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Every idea is endowed of itself with immortal life, like a human being. All created form, even that which is created by man, is immortal. For form is independent of matter: molecules do not constitute form.
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Soon we will plunge ourselves into cold shadows, and all of summer's stunning afternoons will be gone. I already hear the dead thuds of logs below falling on the cobblestones and the lawn.
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My soul travels on the smell of perfume like the souls of other men on music.
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Today I felt pass over me A breath of wind from the wings of madness.
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The People adore authority.
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The act of love strongly resembles torture or surgery.
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It would perhaps be nice to be alternately the victim and the executioner.
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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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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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To say the word Romanticism is to say modern art - that is, intimacy, spirituality, color, aspiration towards the infinite, expressed by every means available to the arts.
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Ne cherchez plus mon coeur les be tes l'ont mange . Don't search any further for my heart wild beasts ate it.
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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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Who would dare assign to art the sterile function of imitating nature?
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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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I will drop into your chest like a vegetal ambrosia. I will be the grain that regenerates the cruelly plowed furrow. Poetry will be born of our intimate union. A god we shall create together, and we shall soar heavenward like sunbeams, perfumes, butterflies, birds, and all winged things.
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