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Everything, alas, is an abyss, — actions, desires, dreams, words!

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
Dreams
Words
Desire
Action
Dream
Abyss
Everything
Alas
Desires
Actions

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I should like the fields tinged with red, the rivers yellow and the trees painted blue. Nature has no imagination.
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Amer savoir, celui qu'on tire du voyage! Bitter is the knowledge gained in travelling.
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Photographers, you will never become artists. All you are is mere copiers.
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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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In our corruption we perceive beauties unrevealed to ancient times.
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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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Unable to suppress love, the Church wanted at least to disinfect it, and it created marriage.
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Being a useful man has always seemed to me to be something truly hideous.
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Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject, nor exact truth, but in the way of feeling.
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By nature, by necessity itself, [primitive man] is encyclopedic, while civilized man finds himself confined in the infinitely small regions of specialization.
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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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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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The will to work must dominate, for art is long and time is brief.
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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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It is by universal misunderstanding that all agree. For if, by ill luck, people understood each other, they would never agree.
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Let us beware of common folk, of common sense, of sentiment, of inspiration, and of the obvious.
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I have more memories than if I were a thousand years old.
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The man who says his evening prayer is a captain posting his sentinels. He can sleep.
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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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Love is a taste for prostitution. In fact, there is no noble pleasure that cannot be reduced to Prostitution.
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