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Being a useful man has always seemed to me to be something truly hideous.

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
Idleness
Useful
Seemed
Truly
Something
Always
Men
Hideous

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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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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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Oh, Creator! Can monsters exist in the sight of him who alone knows how they were invented, how they invented themselves, and how they might not have invented themselves?
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On the day when a young writer corrects his first proof-sheet he is as proud as a schoolboy who has just got his first dose of pox.
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Today I felt pass over me A breath of wind from the wings of madness.
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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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The beautiful is always bizarre.
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There are some temptations which are so strong that they must be virtues.
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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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Anybody, providing he knows how to be amusing, has the right to talk about himself.
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To be just, that is to say, to justify its existence, criticism should be partial, passionate and political, that is to say, written from an exclusive point of view, but a point of view that opens up the widest horizons.
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It would be difficult for me not to conclude that the most perfect type of masculine beauty is Satan, as portrayed by Milton.
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It would perhaps be nice to be alternately the victim and the executioner.
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To glorify the cult of images (my great, my only, my earliest passion).
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What could be more simple and more complex, more obvious and more profound than a portrait.
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Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet upon the same road, one of them has to give place.
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Even if it were proven that God didn't exist, Religion would still be Saintly and Divine.
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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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I love Wagner, but the music I prefer is that of a cat hung up by its tail outside a window and trying to stick to the panes of glass with its claws.
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Art is an infinitely precious good, a draught both refreshing and cheering which restores the stomach and the mind to the natural equilibrium of the ideal.
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