Charles Baudelaire Quotes

These wonderful narrations inspired me with strange feelings. Was man, indeed, at once so powerful, so virtuous, and magnificent, yet so vicious and base? He appeared at one time a mere scion of the evil principle and at another as all that can be conceived of noble and godlike.

The Author's Way of sending forth his Second Part of the Pilgrim. Some things are of that nature as to make One's fancy chuckle, while his heart doth ache.

If a news camera shows up, people will line up, they want to be seen. But at the same time they want both to be chosen and not singled out. I think that is an endless struggle within most.

For my part, I feel that with regard to Nature I live a sort of border life, on the confines of a world, into which I make occasional and transient forays only, and my patriotism and allegiance to the state into whose territories I seem to retreat are those of a moss-trooper. Unto a life which I call natural I would gladly follow even a will-o'-the-wisp through bogs and sloughs unimaginable, but no moon nor fire-fly has shown me the cause-way to it. Nature is a personality so vast and universal that we have never seen one of her features.

Consciousness is nature's nightmare.

Yet do I fear thy nature; It is too full o' the milk of human kindness.

We are at war between consciousness and nature, between the desire for permanence and the fact of flux. It is ourself against ourselves.

Therefore, in my incontrovertible capacity as plaintiff and defendant judge and accused, I condemn this nature, which has so brazenly and unceremoniously inflicted this suffering... since I am unable to destroy Nature, I am destroying myself, solely out of weariness of having to endure a tyranny in which there is no guilty party.

I guess I felt attached to my weakness. My pain and suffering too. Summer light, the smell of a breeze, the sound of cicadas - if I like these things, why should I apologize?

Nature is but an image of wisdom, the last thing of the soul; nature being a thing which doth only do, but not know.

Nature in causing reason and the passions to be born at one and the same time apparently wished by the latter gift to distract man from the evil she had done him by the former, and by only permitting him to live for a few years after the loss of his passions seems to show her pity by early deliverance from a life that reduces him to reason as his sole resource.

Your nature is not the problem. The problem is that you have become alienated from your nature -- from your power source.

Sadly, the things that we have set out as being worth striving for are not ultimately the things that satisfy human longings. And why not? Because we are practically the ultimate paradox: the finite made for the infinite.

She can't help it,' he said. 'She's got the soul of a poet and the emotional makeup of a junkyard dog.

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep but I have promises to keep...

I know my soul hath power to know all things, Yet is she blind and ignorant in all: I know I'm one of Nature's little kings, Yet to the least and vilest things am thrall.

Tell me why it is that a toddler will gag over a perfectly wonderful breakfast of ham, eggs, biscuits, juice, and jelly. But then he will enthusiastically drink the dog's water and play in the toilet. Truly, he is his mother's greatest challenge...; and her most inexpressible joy.

Elodin proved a difficult man to find. He had an office in Hollows, but never seemed to use it. When I visited Ledgers and Lists, I discovered he only taught one class: Unlikely Maths. However, this was less than helpful in tracking him down, as according to the ledger, the time of the class was 'now' and the location was 'everywhere.

When I curse Fate, it's not me, but the earth in me.

Perhaps, on the whole, embarrassment and perplexity are a kind of natural accompaniment to life and movement; and it is better to be driven out of your senses with thinking which of two things you ought to do than to do nothing whatever, and be utterly uninteresting to all the world.

I've heard people say that they cling to their painful thoughts because they're afraid that without them they wouldn't be activists for peace. "If I feel peaceful," they say, "why would I bother taking action at all?"

Now every one must do after his kind, be he asp or angel, and these must.

The unconscious is not just evil by nature, it is also the source of the highest good: not only dark but also light, not only bestial, semihuman, and demonic but superhuman, spiritual, and, in the classical sense of the word, "divine."

Pornography is human imagination in tense theatrical action; its violations are a protest against the violations of our freedom by nature.