Poet Charles Baudelaire

Charles Baudelaire

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Charles Baudelaire Quotes

It is regrettable that, among the Rights of Man, the right of contradicting oneself has been forgotten.
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.
There is no such thing as a long piece of work, except one that you dare not start.
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.
It is necessary to work, if not from inclination, at least from despair. Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.
The world only goes round by misunderstanding.
Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry.
Any healthy man can go without food for two days -- but not without poetry.
It is the greatest art of the devil to convince us he does not exist.
We are weighed down, every moment, by the conception and the sensation of Time. And there are but two means of escaping and forgetting this nightmare: pleasure and work. Pleasure consumes us. Work strengthens us. Let us choose.
It is by universal misunderstanding that all agree. For if, by ill luck, people understood each other, they would never agree.
Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet upon the same road, one of them has to give place.

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Poem of the day

Michael Drayton Poem
Sonnet Lii: What? Dost Thou Mean
 by Michael Drayton

What? Dost thou mean to cheat me of my heart?
To take all mine and give me none again?
Or have thine eyes such magic or that art
That what they get they ever do retain?
Play not the tyrant, but take some remorse;
Rebate thy spleen, if but for pity's sake;
Or, cruel, if thou canst not, let us 'scourse,
And, for one piece of thine, my whole heart take.
...
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