Quote

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.

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
Loathsome
Society
Plate
Lunacy
Moment
Plates
Moments
Contemplating
Metallic
Form
Image
Worshippers
Like
Extraordinary
Rushed
Sun
Contemplate
Onwards
Took
Fanaticism
Narcissus
Hold
Trivial

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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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A book is a garden, a party, a company by the way.
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Strangeness is the indispensable condiment of all beauty.
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Color... thinks by itself, independently of the object it clothes.
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The devil's finest trick is to persuade you that he does not exist.
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Doubt, or the absence of faith and naivete, is a vice peculiar to this age, for no one is obedient nowadays and naivete, which means the dominance of temperament in the manner, is a gift from God, possessed by very few.
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If the poet has pursued a moral objective, he has diminished his poetic force.
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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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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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There is a certain cowardice, a certain weakness, rather, among respectable folk. Only brigands are convinced-of what? That they must succeed. And so they do succeed.
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This industry [photography], by invading the territories of art, has become art's most mortal enemy.
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What could be more simple and more complex, more obvious and more profound than a portrait.
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How little remains of the man I once was, save the memory of him! But remembering is only a new form of suffering.
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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.
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I am the vampire at my own veins.
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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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The immense profundity of thought in vulgar locutions, like holes dug by generations of ants.
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In literature as in ethics, there is danger, as well as glory, in being subtle. Aristocracy isolates us.
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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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