Charles Baudelaire Quotes

Mankind advances only through struggle.

It will always be a battle a day between those who want maximum change and those who want to maintain the status quo.

I wrote some bad poetry that I published in North African journals, but even as I withdrew into this reading, I also led the life of a kind of young hooligan.

In that wide struggle which we call Progress, evil is always the aggressor and the vanquished, and it is right that this should be so, for without its onslaughts and depredations humanity might fall to a fat slumber upon its cornsacks and die snoring.

If there is no struggle there is no progress…. This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle.

There is no progress without struggle.

The nations that are achieving something have no taste for poetry

I was pushing for a career in poetry and of course the received wisdom was that you would never make a living at it.

At the beginning, there was no chance I'd get published so I thought I'd give it a go live. I had to perform in rock band places and working men's clubs, where you wouldn't expect to find poetry. I ploughed a lonely furrow.

My whole life has been a twenty years struggle between poetry and prose, or, if you like to call it so, Music and Law.

Who casts to write a living line, must sweat.

We are not meant to find peace in this world. The spirit of life cannot exist without effort. Destroy the rivalries of man and nations and you will have destroyed all that makes for betterment and progress on Earth.

I'm a failed poet. Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can't, and then tries the short story, which is the most demanding form after poetry. And, failing at that, only then does he take up novel writing.

What you think is the summit is only a step up

Every time I see a certain room to grow, or a new opportunity to advance further, I go out and take it.

Poetry is the statement of a relation between a man and the world

Desire urges me on as fear bridles me" Bruno.

Like it or not, life is a series of competitions.

For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough)-they are experiences.

I do not give the honorific name of 'poetry' to the primitive and the unaccomplished.

It was important to keep moving. Certain struggles continued. Others had to be brought to a close. The wisdom was in deciding which.

The tension of opposites: Life is a series of pulls back and forth. You want to do one thing, but you are bound to do something else. Something hurts you, yet you know it shouldn't. You take certain things for granted, even when you know you should never take anything for granted. A tension of opposites, like a pull on a rubber band. And most of us live somewhere in the middle.

Now I got my foot - through the door - and I ain't goin' no where.

How could one create life with someone who represented death?