Charles Baudelaire Quotes About Literature
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Who would dare assign to art the sterile function of imitating nature?
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If the poet has pursued a moral objective, he has diminished his poetic force.
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To say the word Romanticism is to say modern art - that is, intimacy, spirituality, color, aspiration towards the infinite, expressed by every means available to the arts.
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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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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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Even as a child I felt in my heart two opposite emotions: the horror of life and the ecstasy of life.
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We are all born marked for evil.
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It is time to get drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of Time, get drunk; get drunk without stopping! On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.
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Progress, this great heresy of decay.
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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.
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If photography is allowed to stand in for art in some of its functions it will soon supplant or corrupt it completely thanks to the natural support it will find in the stupidity of the multitude. It must return to its real task, which is to be the servant of the sciences and the arts, but the very humble servant, like printing and shorthand which have neither created nor supplanted literature.
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Anybody, providing he knows how to be amusing, has the right to talk about himself.
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I am unable to understand how a man of honor could take a newspaper in his hands without a shudder of disgust.
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What I have always found most beautiful in the theatre, in my childhood, and still today, is lustre--a beautiful object, luminous, crystalline, complex, circular, symmetrical. However, I do not absolutely deny the value of dramatic literature. Only, I should like the actors to be mounted on high pattens, to wear masks more expressive than the human face, and to speak through megaphones.
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Life is a hospital in which every patient is possessed by a desire to change his bed.
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Always be a poet, even in prose.
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There is no more steely barb than that of the Infinite.
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The man who says his evening prayer is a captain posting his sentinels. He can sleep.
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Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony.
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Nature... is nothing but the inner voice of self-interest.
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Those men get along best with women who can get along best without them.
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For each letter received from a creditor, write fifty lines on an extraterrestrial subject and you will be saved.
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The priest is an immense being because he makes the crowd believe astonishing things.
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Our religion is itself profoundly sad - a religion of universal anguish, and one which, because of its very catholicity, grants full liberty to the individual and asks no better than to be celebrated in each man's own language - so long as he knows anguish and is a painter.
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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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The pleasure we derive from the representation of the present is due, not only to the beauty it can be clothed in, but also to its essential quality of being the present.
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What is exhilarating in bad taste is the aristocratic pleasure of giving offense.
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Sexuality is the lyricism of the masses.
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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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Nothing can be done except little by little.
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