I. Frost's Selected Quotations

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The world only goes round by misunderstanding.
Charles Baudelaire

Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry
Charles Baudelaire

There exist only three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill, to create.
Charles Baudelaire

There are as many kinds of beauty as there are habitual ways of seeking happiness
Charles Baudelaire

There are in every man, at every hour, two simultaneous postulations, one towards God, the other towards Satan
Charles Baudelaire

Love is the natural occupation of the man of leisure
Charles Baudelaire

For the merchant, even honesty is a financial speculation
Charles Baudelaire

Evil is done without effort, naturally, it is the working of fate; good is always the product of an art.
Charles Baudelaire
Love is a taste for prostitution. In fact, there is no noble pleasure that cannot be reduced to Prostitution.
Charles Baudelaire

How little remains of the man I once was, save the memory of him! But remembering is only a new form of suffering.
Charles Baudelaire

Poetry has no goal other than itself; it can have no other, and no poem will be so great, so noble, so truly worthy of the name of poem, than one written uniquely for the pleasure of writing a poem
Charles Baudelaire

This life is a hospital in which every patient is possessed with a desire to change his bed
Charles Baudelaire

There is no dream of love, however ideal it may be, which does not end up with a fat, greedy baby hanging from the breast.
Charles Baudelaire

Everything for me becomes allegory
Charles Baudelaire

Progress, this great heresy of decay
Charles Baudelaire

Any man who does not accept the conditions of life sells his soul.
Charles Baudelaire

Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and calculation
Charles Baudelaire

What is art? Prostitution
Charles Baudelaire

Multitude, solitude: equal and interchangeable terms for the active and prolific poet
Charles Baudelaire

A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors
Charles Baudelaire

I am a cemetery abhorred by the moon
Charles Baudelaire

It is by universal misunderstanding that all agree. For if, by ill luck, people understood each other, they would never agree.
Charles Baudelaire

Let us beware of common folk, of common sense, of sentiment, of inspiration, and of the obvious.
Charles Baudelaire

It is from the womb of art that criticism was born
Charles Baudelaire

I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no Melancholy
Charles Baudelaire

There is no such thing as a long piece of work, except one that you dare not start.
Charles Baudelaire