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Charles Baudelaire (1821 – 1867)


French poet, critic and translator.
Charles Baudelaire
La modernité, c’est le transitoire, le fugitif, le contingent, la moitié de l’art, dont l’autre moitié est l’éternel et l’immuable.
Baudelaire quotes
La plus belle des ruses du diable est de vous persuader qu'il n'existe pas.
Baudelaire
The imagination eulogized by Baudelaire is in his own case more often than not a synonym for desire or despair. His critical exigencies are, like those of the profoundly sick man that he was, harsh and imperative and illusory in the sense of release temporarily obtained. Yet imagination is also the faculty that gives Baudelaire a royal sense of equality with other creative artists; he uses his status as a poet to boost his activities as a critic, claiming, with total justification in his case, that criticism is a creative affair, a fine rather than applied art.




Baudelaire Charles quotes
La jeune fille, ce qu'elle est en réalité.
Baudelaire Charles
Le génie n’est que l’enfance retrouvée ? volonté.
Charles Baudelaire quotes
La Révolution a été faite par des voluptueux.
Charles Baudelaire
Poe with a cross, that's what you are, adored of the gangster age.
Baudelaire Charles quotes
On ne peut oublier le temps qu'en s'en servant.
Baudelaire
La femme ne sait pas séparer l'âme du corps.
Baudelaire Charles
Le génie n'est que l'enfance retrouvée ? volonté, l'enfance douée maintenant, pour s'exprimer, d'organes virils et de l'esprit analytique qui lui permet d'ordonner la somme de matériaux involontairement amassée.
Charles Baudelaire
Faire son devoir tous les jours et se fier ? Dieu, pour le lendemain.




Charles Baudelaire quotes
Gautier says, “Baudelaire abhorred philanthropy, progressivists, utilitarians, humanitarians and utopianists.” In other words, Baudelaire condemned Rousseauism in all its forms. Today, Rousseauism has so triumphed that the arts and the avant-garde are synonymous with liberalism, an error enforced by literature teachers, with their humanist bias. I follow the Decadents in trying to drive Rousseauist benevolence out of the discourse in art and literature. The Decadents satirized the liberal faith in progress with sizzling prophecies of catastrophe and cultural collapse.
Charles Baudelaire
Being pre-eminently a moralist, he needed a medium that enabled him to illustrate a moral insight as briefly and vividly as possible. Being an artist and sensualist, he needed a medium that was epigrammatic or aphoristic, but allowed him scope for fantasy and for that element of suggestiveness which he considered essential to beauty.
Baudelaire quotes
"En toi je tomberai, végétale ambroisie,
Grain précieux jeté par l'éternel Semeur,
Pour que de notre amour naisse la poésie
Qui jaillira vers Dieu comme une rare fleur!"
Baudelaire Charles
Baudelaire, to whom the sole pleasure in love was the knowledge of doing evil and who hoped to conquer solitude by inspiring universal horror and disgust.
Baudelaire Charles quotes
Tu m’as donné ta boue et j’en ai fait de l’or.
Charles Baudelaire
Baudelaire is the great symbol of l’art pour l’art (art for the sake of art): sickness as beauty. Baudelaire is thus Liberalism in literature, disease as a principle of Life, crisis as health, morbidity as soul-life, disintegration as purpose.
Charles Baudelaire quotes
?tre un homme utile m'a paru toujours quelque chose de bien hideux.
Charles Baudelaire
L'étude du beau est un duel o? l'artiste crie de frayeur avant d'?tre vaincu.
Baudelaire Charles
J'ai toujours été étonné qu'on laissât les femmes entrer dans les églises. Quelle conversation peuvent-elles avoir avec Dieu?


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