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Art
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A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.
-Charles Baudelaire
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The more a man cultivates the arts the less he fornicates. A more and more apparent cleavage occurs between the spirit and the brute.
-Charles Baudelaire
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Authors & Writing
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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.
-Charles Baudelaire
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Beauty
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All forms of beauty, like all possible phenomena, contain an element of the eternal and an element of the transitory -- of the absolute and of the particular. Absolute and eternal beauty does not exist, or rather it is only an abstraction creamed from the general surface of different beauties. The particular element in each manifestation comes from the emotions: and just as we have our own particular emotions, so we have our own beauty.
-Charles Baudelaire
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There are as many kinds of beauty as there are habitual ways of seeking happiness.
-Charles Baudelaire
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Beginnings
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There is no such thing as a long piece of work, except one that you dare not start.
-Charles Baudelaire, Intimate Journals
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Boredom
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Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.
-Charles Baudelaire
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Business
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For the merchant, even honesty is a financial speculation.
-Charles Baudelaire
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Cats
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Both ardent lovers and austere scholars, when once they come to the years of discretion, love cats, so strong and gentle, the pride of the household, who like them are sensitive to the cold, and sedentary.
-Charles Baudelaire
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City Life, Cities
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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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Consumerism
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The son will run away from the family not at eighteen but at twelve, emancipated by his gluttonous precocity; he will fly not to seek heroic adventures, not to deliver a beautiful prisoner from a tower, not to immortalize a garret with sublime thoughts, but to found a business, to enrich himself and to compete with his infamous papa.
-Charles Baudelaire
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Criticism
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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.
-Charles Baudelaire
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It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.
-Charles Baudelaire
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Culture
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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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Evil
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...He made no complaint whatsoever about the bad reputation he had attracted throughout the world, assured me that he himself was the person most concerned by the destruction of superstition, and admitted to me that as far as his own power was concerned he had been afraid on only one occasion, which was when he had heard a preacher, more subtle than his colleagues, shout out from the pulpit: 'Dearly beloved, never forget, when you hear anyone vaunt the progress of enlightenment, that the Devil's finest trick is to persuade you that he does not exist!'
-Charles Baudelaire, The Generous Gambler short story, published February 7, 1864
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Evil is done without effort, naturally, it is the working of fate; good is always the product of an art.
-Charles Baudelaire
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The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he doesn't exist
-Charles Baudelaire
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Fantasy
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I consider it useless and tedious to represent what exists, because nothing that exists satisfies me. Nature is ugly, and I prefer the monsters of my fancy to what is positively trivial.
-Charles Baudelaire
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Fashion
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All fashions are charming, or rather relatively charming, each one being a new striving, more or less well conceived, after beauty, an approximate statement of an ideal, the desire for which constantly teases the unsatisfied human mind.
-Charles Baudelaire
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Genius
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Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man's physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed.
-Charles Baudelaire
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Government
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We all have the republican spirit in our veins, like syphilis in our bones. We are democratized and venerealized.
-Charles Baudelaire
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Health
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As a remedy against all ills; poverty, sickness, and melancholy only one thing is absolutely necessary; a liking for work.
-Charles Baudelaire
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Immortality
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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.
-Charles Baudelaire
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Infinity
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There is no more steely barb than that of the Infinite.
-Charles Baudelaire
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Innovation
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Nearly all our originality comes from the stamp that time impresses upon our sensibility.
-Charles Baudelaire
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Books by and about Charles Baudelaire