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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
Everything
Alas
Desires
Actions
Dreams
Words
Desire
Action
Dream
Abyss

More quotes by Charles Baudelaire

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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.
Charles Baudelaire
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It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.
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Always be a poet, even in prose.
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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.
Charles Baudelaire
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If the poet has pursued a moral objective, he has diminished his poetic force.
Charles Baudelaire
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I should like the fields tinged with red, the rivers yellow and the trees painted blue. Nature has no imagination.
Charles Baudelaire
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Nations, like families, have great men only in spite of themselves.
Charles Baudelaire
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How bittersweet it is, on winter's night, To listen, by the sputtering, smoking fire, As distant memories, through the fog-dimmed light, Rise, to the muffled chime of churchbell choir.
Charles Baudelaire
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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?
Charles Baudelaire
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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.
Charles Baudelaire
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Evil is committed without effort, naturally, fatally goodness is always the product of some art.
Charles Baudelaire
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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.
Charles Baudelaire
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Wine transforms moles into eagles.
Charles Baudelaire
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Il faut travailler sinon par go u t, au moins par de sespoir, puisque, tout bien ve rifie , travailler est moins ennuyeux que s'amuser. We should work: if not by preference, at least out of despair. All things considered, work is less boring than amusement.
Charles Baudelaire
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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.
Charles Baudelaire
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Evil comes up softly like a flower.
Charles Baudelaire
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What strange phenomena we find in a great city, all we need do is stroll about with our eyes open. Life swarms with innocent monsters.
Charles Baudelaire
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Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.
Charles Baudelaire
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Evil is done without effort, naturally, it's destiny good is always the product of skill.
Charles Baudelaire
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If the word doesn't exist, invent it but first be sure it doesn't exist.
Charles Baudelaire