Modernity is the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, which make up one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immutable. This transitory fugitive element, which is constantly changing, must not be despised or neglected.
From Charles Baudelaire
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.
If the poet has pursued a moral objective, he has diminished his poetic force.
Progress, this great heresy of decay.
Beauty is the sole ambition, the exclusive goal of Taste.
It is the hour to be drunken! to escape being the martyred slaves of time, be ceaselessly drunk. On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.
The man who says his evening prayer is a captain posting his sentinels. He can sleep.
To the solemn graves, near a lonely cemetery, my heart like a muffled drum is beating funeral marches.
An artist is an artist only because of his exquisite sense of beauty, a sense which shows him intoxicating pleasures, but which at the same time implies and contains an equally exquisite sense of all deformities and all disproportion.
There exist only three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill, to create.
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