“Always be a poet, even in prose.”
Charles Baudelaire3
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48 quotes in this collection
“Always be a poet, even in prose.”
“Inspiration comes of working every day.”
“If rape or arson, poison or the knife Has wove no pleasing patterns in the stuff Of this drab canvas we accept as life - It is because we are not bold enough!”
“Hypocrite reader my fellow my brother!”
“The dance can reveal everything mysterious that is hidden in music, and it has the additional merit of being human and palpable. Dancing is poetry with arms and legs.”
“I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no Melancholy.”
“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.”
“I can barely conceive a type of beauty in which there is no melancholy.”
“Sexuality is the lyricism of the masses.”
“Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.”
“Modernity signifies the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art of which the other half is the eternal and the immutable.”
“Any man who does not accept the conditions of life sells his soul.”
“It would be difficult for me not to conclude that the most perfect type of masculine beauty is Satan, as portrayed by Milton.”
“Nature... is nothing but the inner voice of self-interest.”
“A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors.”
“There exist only three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill, to create.”
“He possessed the logic of all good intentions and a knowledge of all the tricks of his trade, and yet he never succeeded at anything, because he believed too much in the impossible. Surprising? Why so? He was forever in the act of conceiving it!”
“There are moments of existence when time and space are more profound, and the awareness of existence is immensely heightened.”
“I set out to discover the why of it, and to transform my pleasure into knowledge.”
“All which is beautiful and noble is the result of reason and calculation.”
“It is by universal misunderstanding that all agree. For if, by ill luck, people understood each other, they would never agree.”
“With heart at rest I climbed the citadel's Steep height, and saw the city as from a tower, Hospital, brothel, prison, and such hells, Where evil comes up softly like a flower. Thou knowest, O Satan, patron of my pain, Not for vain tears I went up at that hour; But like an old sad faithful lecher, fain To drink delight of that enormous trull Whose hellish beauty makes me young again. Whether thou sleep, with heavy vapors full, Sodden with day, or, new appareled, stand In gold-laced veils of evening beautiful, I love thee, infamous city! Harlots and Hunted have pleasures of their own to give, The vulgar herd can never understand.”
“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.”
“If the poet has pursued a moral objective, he has diminished his poetic force.”
“A sweetheart is a bottle of wine, a wife is a wine bottle.”
“Let us beware of common folk, of common sense, of sentiment, of inspiration, and of the obvious.”
“When I was young I lived a constant storm, Though now and then the brilliant suns shot through, So in my garden few red fruits were born, The rain and thunder had so much to do. - The Enemy”
“To be a great man and a saint for oneself, that is the only important thing.”
“As a remedy against all ills - poverty, sickness, and melanchol - only one thing is absolutely necessary: a liking for work.”
“It is necessary to work, if not from inclination, at least from despair. Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.”
“I have cultivated my hysteria with joy and terror.”
“But a dandy can never be a vulgar man.”
“A multitude of small delights constitute happiness.”
“I have cultivated my hysteria with pleasure and terror.”
“In literature as in ethics, there is danger, as well as glory, in being subtle. Aristocracy isolates us.”
“The will to work must dominate, for art is long and time is brief.”
“To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.”
“The man who says his prayers in the evening is a captain posting his sentries. After that, he can sleep.”
“Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry.”
“The world only goes round by misunderstanding.”
“If the word doesn't exist, invent it; but first be sure it doesn't exist.”
“France is not poetic; she even feels, in fact, a congenital horror of poetry. Among the writers who use verse, those whom she will always prefer are the most prosaic.”
“Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.”
“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.”
“There are as many kinds of beauty as there are habitual ways of seeking happiness.”
“In putting off what one has to do, one runs the risk of never being able to do it.”
“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.”
“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.”