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Read through the most famous quotes by topic #baudelaire
I sit in the sky like a sphinx misunderstood; My heart of snow is wed to the whiteness of swans; I hate the movement that displaces the rigid lines, With lips untaught neither tears nor laughter do I know. ↗
Ô toi, le plus savant et le plus beau des Anges, Dieu trahi par le sort et privé de louanges, Ô Satan, prends pitié de ma longue misère! Ô Prince de l'exil, à qui l'on a fait tort Et qui, vaincu, toujours te redresses plus fort, Ô Satan, prends pitié de ma longue misère! Toi qui sais tout, grand roi des choses souterraines, Guérisseur familier des angoisses humaines, Ô Satan, prends pitié de ma longue misère! Toi qui, même aux lépreux, aux parias maudits, Enseignes par l'amour le goût du Paradis, Ô Satan, prends pitié de ma longue misère! Ô toi qui de la Mort, ta vieille et forte amante, Engendras l'Espérance, — une folle charmante! Ô Satan, prends pitié de ma longue misère! Toi qui fais au proscrit ce regard calme et haut Qui damne tout un peuple autour d'un échafaud. Ô Satan, prends pitié de ma longue misère! Toi qui sais en quels coins des terres envieuses Le Dieu jaloux cacha les pierres précieuses, Ô Satan, prends pitié de ma longue misère! Toi dont l'oeil clair connaît les profonds arsenaux Où dort enseveli le peuple des métaux, Ô Satan, prends pitié de ma longue misère! Toi dont la large main cache les précipices Au somnambule errant au bord des édifices, Ô Satan, prends pitié de ma longue misère! Toi qui, magiquement, assouplis les vieux os De l'ivrogne attardé foulé par les chevaux, Ô Satan, prends pitié de ma longue misère! Toi qui, pour consoler l'homme frêle qui souffre, Nous appris à mêler le salpêtre et le soufre, Ô Satan, prends pitié de ma longue misère! Toi qui poses ta marque, ô complice subtil, Sur le front du Crésus impitoyable et vil, Ô Satan, prends pitié de ma longue misère! Toi qui mets dans les yeux et dans le coeur des filles Le culte de la plaie et l'amour des guenilles, Ô Satan, prends pitié de ma longue misère! Bâton des exilés, lampe des inventeurs, Confesseur des pendus et des conspirateurs, Ô Satan, prends pitié de ma longue misère! Père adoptif de ceux qu'en sa noire colère Du paradis terrestre a chassés Dieu le Père, Ô Satan, prends pitié de ma longue misère! Prière Gloire et louange à toi, Satan, dans les hauteurs Du Ciel, où tu régnas, et dans les profondeurs De l'Enfer, où, vaincu, tu rêves en silence! Fais que mon âme un jour, sous l'Arbre de Science, Près de toi se repose, à l'heure où sur ton front Comme un Temple nouveau ses rameaux s'épandront! ↗
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. ↗
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. ↗
(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 – he had found, hatching in the dismal forcing-house of ennui, the frightening climacteric of thoughts and emotions. ↗
Astral Weeks,” insofar as it can be pinned down, is a record about people stunned by life, completely overwhelmed, stalled in their skins, their ages and selves, paralyzed by the enormity of what in one moment of vision they can comprehend. It is a precious and terrible gift, born of a terrible truth, because what they see is both infinitely beautiful and terminally horrifying: the unlimited human ability to create or destroy, according to whim. It’s no Eastern mystic or psychedelic vision of the emerald beyond, nor is it some Baudelairean perception of the beauty of sleaze and grotesquerie. Maybe what it boils down to is one moment’s knowledge of the miracle of life, with its inevitable concomitant, a vertiginous glimpse of the capacity to be hurt, and the capacity to inflict that hurt. ↗
Laments of an Icarus The paramours of courtesans Are well and satisfied, content. But as for me my limbs are rent Because I clasped the clouds as mine. I owe it to the peerless stars Which flame in the remotest sky That I see only with spent eyes Remembered suns I knew before. In vain I had at heart to find The center and the end of space. Beneath some burning, unknown gaze I feel my very wings unpinned And, burned because I beauty loved, I shall not know the highest bliss, And give my name to the abyss Which waits to claim me as its own. ↗
If rape or arson, poison or the knife Has wove no pleasing patterns in the stuff Of this drab canvas we accept as life - It is because we are not bold enough! ↗
