"Paris Spleen" Quotes
"Paris Spleen" is a collection of prose poems by Charles Baudelaire that explores the beauty, melancholy, and absurdity of urban life in 19th-century Paris.
poetry | 118 pages | Published in NaN
Quotes
What strange phenomena we find in a great city, all we need do is stroll about with our eyes open. Life swarms with innocent monsters.
Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will.
The lover of life makes the whole world into his family, just as the lover of the fair sex creates his from all the lovely women he has found, from those that could be found, and those who are impossible to find.
You have to be always drunk. That's all there is to it—it's the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk.
What is art? Prostitution.
Evil is committed without effort, naturally, fatally; goodness is always the product of some art.
Love is a disease to be born with patience, like any nervous fever.
The desire to create constantly is vulgar and betrays jealousy, envy, ambition. If one is something, one really does not need to make anything— and if one does make things, one is so much the less something.
I am unable to understand how a man of honor could take a newspaper in his hands without a shudder of disgust.
What is exhilarating in bad taste is the aristocratic pleasure of giving offense.
