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Our squalid society rushed, Narcissus to a man, to gaze on its trivial image on a scrap of metal.

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
Metal
Metals
Image
Squalid
Society
Narcissus
Men
Rushed
Scrap
Trivial
Gaze

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I am bored in France because everyone resembles Voltaire.
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The cannon thunders... limbs fly in all directions... one can hear the groans of victims and the howling of those performing the sacrifice... it's Humanity in search of happiness.
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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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Woman is natural, that is to say, abominable.
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There are but three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the warrior and the poet. To know, to kill and to create. The rest of mankind may be taxed and drudged, they are born for the stable, that is to say, to practise what they call professions.
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The habit of doing one's duty drives away fear.
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He who looks through an open window sees fewer things than he who looks through a closed window.
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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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Let us beware of common folk, of common sense, of sentiment, of inspiration, and of the obvious.
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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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Unable to suppress love, the Church wanted at least to disinfect it, and it created marriage.
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To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.
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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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There is no such thing as a long piece of work, except one that you dare not start.
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Any man who does not accept the conditions of life sells his soul.
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I have to confess that I had gambled on my soul and lost it with heroic insouciance and lightness of touch. The soul is so impalpable, so often useless, and sometimes such a nuisance, that I felt no more emotion on losing it than if, on a stroll, I had mislaid my visiting card.
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The vices of man, as full of horror as one might suppose them to be, contain the proof (if in nothing else but their infinitely expandable nature) of his taste for the infinite only, it is a taste that often takes a wrong turn.
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If the poet has pursued a moral objective, he has diminished his poetic force.
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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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