Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

“The beautiful is always bizarre.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“Great writers, I discovered, were not to be bowed down before and worshipped, but embraced and befriended. Their names resounded through history not because they had massive brows and thought deep incomprehensible thoughts, but because they opened windows in the mind, they put their arms round you and showed you things you always knew but never dared to believe. Even if their names were terrifyingly foreign and intellectual sounding, Dostoevsky, Baudelaire or Cavafy, they turned out to be charming and wonderful and quite unalarming after all.”
― Stephen Fry, The Library Book

“I want to say something about bad writing. I'm proud of my bad writing. Everyone is so intelligent lately, and stylish. Fucking great. I am proud of Philip Guston's bad painting, I am proud of Baudelaire's mamma's boy goo goo misery. Sometimes the lurid or shitty means having a heart, which's something you have to try to have. Excellence nowadays is too general and available to be worth prizing: I am interested in people who have to find strange and horrible ways to just get from point a to point b.”
― Ariana Reines

“(Baudelaire) had descended to the bottom of the inexhaustible mine, had picked his way along abandoned or unexplored galleries, and had finally reached those districts of the soul where the monstrous vegetations of the sick mind flourish. There, near the breeding ground of intellectuals aberrations and disease of the mind - the mysterious tetanus, the burning fever of lust, the thyphoids and yellow fevers of crime â€� he had found, hatching in the dismal forcing-house of ennui, the frightening climacteric of thoughts and emotions.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature

“This life is a hospital where every patient is possessed with the desire to change beds; one man would like to suffer in front of the stove, and another believes that he would recover his health beside the window.”
― Charles Baudelaire, On Wine and Hashish

“Baudelaire writes: In certain almost supernatural inner states, the depth of life is entirely revealed in the spectacle, however ordinary, that we have before our eyes, and which becomes the symbol of it." Here we have a passage that designates the phenomenological direction I myself pursue. The exterior spectacle helps intimate grandeur unfold.”
― Gaston Bachelard

“Be Drunken, Always. That is the point; nothing else matters. If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time weigh you down and crush you to the earth, be drunken continually.

Drunken with what? With wine, with poetry or with virtue, as you please. But be drunken.

And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace, or on the green grass in a ditch, or in the dreary solitude of your own room, you should awaken and find the drunkenness half or entirely gone, ask of the wind, of the wave, of the star, of the bird, of the clock, of all that flies, of all that speaks, ask what hour it is; and wind, wave, star, bird, or clock will answer you: "It is the hour to be drunken! Be Drunken, if you would not be the martyred slaves of Time; be drunken continually! With wine, with poetry or with virtue, as you please.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“Nations, like families, have great men only in spite of themselves.”
― Charles Baudelaire, Fusées, Mon coeur mis à nu, La Belgique déshabillée

“At a period when Literature was wont to attribute the grief of living exclusively to the mischances of disappointed love or the jealousy of adulterous deceptions, he had said not a word of these childish maladies, but had sounded those more incurable, more poignant and more profound: wounds that are inflicted by satiety, disillusion and contempt in ruined souls tortured by the present, disgusted with the past, terrified and desperate of the future.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature

“The other day an entomologist friend of mine told me that for a beehive to produce a kilo of honey it must gather pollen from five million flowers. Thinking of this extraordinary effort I have been wondering how many books Baudelaire had to read, how many lives he had to live, to write a single line of poetry.”
― José Eduardo Agualusa, Nação Crioula

“evening harmony

behold the times when trembling on their stems
the flowers evaporate like thuribles
the sounds and scents turn in the evening cool;
sad waltz, languid intoxication!

the flowers evaporate like thuribles
the viol quivers like a heart that's torn
sad waltz, languid intoxication!
the sky is sad like some memorial.

the viol quivers like a heart that's torn
a heart that hates the void perpetual!
the sky is sad like some memorial
the sun has drowned in it's vermillion

a heart that hates the void perpetual
recalls each glowing moment of times gone!
the sun has drowned in it's vermillion;

your memory shines my monstrance personal”
― Charles Baudelaire

“In certain almost supernatural states of mind, the profundity of life is revealed in its entirety in the spectacle, common as it may be, that we have before our eyes. It becomes the symbol of it.”
― Charles Baudelaire, My Heart Laid Bare

“I’ve become more aware of myself. Because of the situation. Now that I’m no I’m leaving, I see things differently. I’ve been aware of little things that I would have missed before.
‘Like what?�
Like seeing the sun shine off the roof of our old barn. I saw that this morning and stood there, looking at it. I found it moving. It was beautiful - it really was. I don’t usually think about if a landscape is beautiful or not, but I couldn’t control this feeling. I saw it and recognized that it was beautiful. But you know what? It made me sad.
‘Sad?� I can hear him typing. He’s trying to do it quietly, but I can hear. ‘Why?�
I don’t know. I have no idea.
‘Because beauty is fleeting, maybe?�
No, I say. It’s the opposite. Beauty isn’t fleeting. Beauty is eternal. But . . . I’m not. I’m fleeting. That’s more the point.
He’s typing stops abruptly.
â€� that’s quite profound. You do seem more self-aware and introspective them when I first arrived. It makes me think of Baudelaire: â€� I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no melancholyâ€�.”
― Iain Reid, Foe

“We'll be fineâ€�, Pierre-Auguste Renoir said assertively. ‘We are good artist; we know that. Remember what Baudelaire said before he died: "Nothing can be done except little by little." That is what we are doing, it is not big, but it is something!”
― Will Gompertz, What Are You Looking At?: 150 Years of Modern Art in a Nutshell

“Beauty, you walk on corpses, mocking them;”
― Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal

“The Soup and the Clouds

My dear little mad beloved was serving my dinner, and I was looking out of the open dining room window contemplating those moving architectural marvels that God constructs out of mist, edifices of the impalpable. And as I looked I was saying to myself: “All those phantasmagoria are almost as beautiful as my beloved’s beautiful eyes, as the green eyes of my mad monstrous little beloved.�

All of a sudden I felt a terrible blow of a fist on my back and heard a husky and charming voice, an hysterical voice, a hoarse brandy voice, the voice of my dear little beloved, saying: “Aren’t you ever going to eat your soup, you damned bastard of a cloud-monger?”
― Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen

“Oh! Moeten wij eeuwig lijden of altijd vluchten voor wat mooi is?”
― Baudelaire

“Het weidse park bezwijmt onder het brandend oog van de zon, net als de jeugd onder de heerschappij van de Liefde.”
― Baudelaire

“Eindelijk! De tirannie van het menselijk gelaat is verdwenen en ik zal alleen nog maar door mijzelf lijden.”
― Baudelaire

“Menigte, eenzaamheid: termen die voor de actieve en vruchtbare dichter gelijk en verwisselbaar zijn.”
― Baudelaire

“(...), al die bewogen en gesloten zielen in wie de laatste zuchten van een onweer nog rommelen, en die ver terugwijken voor de brutale blik van de mensen die plezier maken en niets te doen hebben.”
― Baudelaire

“Ten slotte, in de namiddag, onder een bekoorlijke herfstlucht, zo'n lucht waaruit verlangens en herinneringen in grote getale neerdalen, ging ze ergens achteraf in een tuin zitten, om, ver van de menigte, naar een van die concerten te luisteren waar de muzikanten van de regimenten de Parijse bevolking op trakteren.”
― Baudelaire

“(...), waar de weelde zich met welbehagen in het ordelijke spiegelt (...)”
― Baudelaire

“Zijn mooie, matte ogen, van een donkere en onbestemde kleur, leken op viooltjes die de last van de dikke tranen van het onweer nog dragen (...)”
― Baudelaire

“(...) en hun gedachten nemen nu de zachte en onbestemde kleuren van de schemering aan.”
― Baudelaire

“Comienzan las alucinaciones. Los objetos exteriores adoptan apariencias monstruosas. Se te revelan en formas hasta entonces desconocidas. Luego se deforman, se transforman y, por fin, entran en tu ser o tú entras en ellos. Los equívocos más singulares, las más inexplicables transposiciones de ideas se producen. Los sonidos tienen color, los colores tienen música. Las notas musicales son númerosy resuelves con pasmosa rapidez prodigiosos cálculos aritméticos a medida que la música se desarrolla en tus oídos. Estás sentado y fumas; crees estar sentado en tu pipa y tu pipa te está fumando a ti; eres tú el que se exhala en forma de nubes azuladas.”
― Charles Baudelaire, On Wine and Hashish

“The free countries are curiously lethargic about their freedom. The credit of revolution is strong in Western Europe, while capitalism, especially in its hated American form, is held to be dying. Many exult over its approaching death. Tired of old evils, they long for "the new thing" and will not be happy until they've had it. Baudelaire writes, in one of his journals, that life is a hospital in which patient believes that he will recover if he is moved to another bed.”
― Saul Bellow, To Jerusalem and Back

“The important fact about Baudelaire is that he was essentially a Christian, born out of his due time, and a classicist, born out of his due time. In his verse technique, he is nearer to Racine than to Mr. Symons; in his sensibility, he is near to Dante and not without sympathy with Tertullian. But Baudelaire was not an aesthetic or a political Christian; his tendency to ritual, which Mr. Symons, with his highly acute but blind sensibility, has observed, springs from no attachment to the outward forms of Christianity, but from the instincts of a soul that was naturaliter Christian. And being the kind of Christian that he was, born when he was, he had to discover Christianity for himself. In this pursuit he was alone in the solitude which is only known to saints. To him the notion of Original Sin came spontaneously, and the need for prayer.”
― T.S. Eliot, For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays Ancient & Modern

“In this watercolor Gavarni portrays an individual whose father was an industrialist and whose older brother was a distinguished professor. From the looks of him, Hippolyte Beauvisage Thomire had a keen eye for fashion in casual clothing, however.
He represents the new generation of bourgeois consumers that emerged during the July Monarchy. He is the modern young man off the newly invented fashion plates and out of the cast of Balzac’s Human Comedy.

Charles Baudelaire, the great cultural critic of Louis Philippe’s reign in latter years, called the artist Gavarni “the poet of official dandysme." Dandysme, Baudelaire said (in his famous essay “De l’heroisme de la vie moderne� [The heroism of modern life], which appeared in his review of the Salon of 1846), was “a modern thing.� By this he meant that it was a way for bourgeois men to use their clothing as a costume in order to stand out from the respectable, black-coated crowd in an age when aristocratic codes were crumbling and democratic values had not yet fully replaced them.

The dandy was not Baudelaire’s “modern hero,â€� however. “The black suit and the frock coat not only have their political beauty as an expression of general equality,â€� he wrote, “but also their poetic beauty as an expression of the public mentality.â€� That is why Baudelaire worshiped ambitious rebels, men who disguised themselves by dressing like everyone else. “For the heroes of the Iliad cannot hold a candle to you, Vautrin, Rastignac, Birotteau [all three were major characters in Balzac’s novels] . . . who did not dare to confess to the public what you went through under the macabre dress coat that all of us wear, or to you Honore de Balzac, the strangest, most romantic, and most poetic among all the characters created by your imagination,â€� Baudelaire declared.”
― Robert J. Bezucha, The Art of the July Monarchy: France, 1830 to 1848