My Heart Laid Bare Quotes

“As a small child, I felt in my heart two contradictory feelings, the horror of life and the ecstasy of life.”
― Charles Baudelaire, My Heart Laid Bare

“No task is a long one but the task on which one dare not start. It becomes a nightmare.”
― Charles Baudelaire, My Heart Laid Bare

“Lost in this awful world, rubbing shoulders with the multitudes, I am like a tired man whose eye can't see behind him, in the deep years, anything but disillusion and bitterness, and in front of him, nothing but a storm which contains nothing new, neither learning nor pain.”
― Charles Baudelaire, My Heart Laid Bare: Intimate diaries with 30 illustrations

“God is a scandal, - a profitable scandal.”
― Charles Baudelaire, My Heart Laid Bare: Intimate diaries with 30 illustrations

“Regarding sleep, this sinister adventure of each night, one could say that people fall asleep daily with an audacity that would be incomprehensible if we didn't know that it results from their being oblivious of danger.”
― Charles Baudelaire, My Heart Laid Bare: Intimate diaries with 30 illustrations

“There is no reasonable, stable government save the aristocratic. Monarchy and republic, based on democracy, are equally weak and absurd. … There exist but three respectable beings: the priest, the warrior, the poet. To know, to kill, and to create. Other men are serfs or slaves, created for the stable, that is, to exercise what are called professions.”
― Charles Baudelaire, Mon cœur mis à nu

“A cada minuto nos sentimos aplastados por la idea y la sensación del tiempo. Y no hay más que dos recursos para escapar a esa pesadilla, para olvidarla: el placer y el trabajo. El placer nos gasta. El trabajo nos fortifica. Elijamos”
― Charles Baudelaire, My Heart Laid Bare

“believe I already wrote in my notes that love was very similar to torture or surgery. But this idea can be developed in a most bitter way. Even if two lovers are very much in love and full of mutual desires, one of the two will always be calmer or less possessed than the other. The former is the operator or the executioner; the latter is the subject, the victim. Do you hear these sighs, preludes to a tragedy of dishonor, these groans, these cries, these gasps? Who hasn't uttered them, who has resisted extorting them? And what do you find to be the worst part of the torment applied by the careful torturers? The revolting sleepwalker eyes, the limbs with muscles that jump or stiffen as if they were galvanized; certainly, not even the most furious effects of intoxication, delirium or opium could provide such horrible and curious examples. And the human face, which Ovid believed to be made to reflect the stars, is now wearing an expression of crazy ferocity or slackening in some sort of death. Surely, I would think it a sacrilege if I used the word "ecstasy" for such decomposition.”
― Charles Baudelaire, My Heart Laid Bare: Intimate diaries with 30 illustrations

“I'm not saying that the world will be reduced to expedient means and ridiculous disorder of the South American republics, - that we could maybe even return to savagery, and walk through the overgrown ruins of our civilization searching for food with a gun in our hand. No; - because such a destiny and such adventures would still presuppose a vital energy, an echo of primeval ages. As the new example and the new victims of inexorable moral laws, we shall perish by what we thought was our life-giver. Engineering will make us so Americanized, progress will create such great atrophy of everything spiritual in us, that the bloody, sacrilegious or unnatural dreams of the utopians could never compare with its positive results.”
― Charles Baudelaire, My Heart Laid Bare: Intimate diaries with 30 illustrations

“For every letter of creditors, write fifty lines on an extraterrestrial subject and you'll be saved.”
― Charles Baudelaire, My Heart Laid Bare: Intimate diaries with 30 illustrations

“I believe that the infinite and mysterious charm that lies in the contemplation of a moving vessel is caused, firstly, by the regularity and symmetry that are among the primordial needs of the human spirit, to the same degree as complication and harmony - and, secondly, by the multiplication and generation of all the imaginary curves and figures produced in space by the real elements of the object. The poetic idea released by this operation of movement in the lines is the hypothesis of a being that is vast, immense, complicated but eurythmic, an animal full of genius, suffering and sighing all the sighs and all the human ambitions.”
― Charles Baudelaire, My Heart Laid Bare: Intimate diaries with 30 illustrations

“The act of love greatly resembles torture or surgery.”
― Charles Baudelaire, My Heart Laid Bare: Intimate diaries with 30 illustrations

“Music pierces the sky.”
― Charles Baudelaire, My Heart Laid Bare: Intimate diaries with 30 illustrations

“In certain almost supernatural states of mind, the profundity of life is revealed in its entirety in the spectacle, common as it may be, that we have before our eyes. It becomes the symbol of it.”
― Charles Baudelaire, My Heart Laid Bare

“The beginning of a novel: start a subject, no matter where, and to have the desire to finish, start with very beautiful phrases.”
― Charles Baudelaire, My Heart Laid Bare: Intimate diaries with 30 illustrations

“There are no great men save the poet, the priest, and the soldier.
The man who sings, the man who offers up sacrifice, and the man who sacrifices himself.
The rest are born for the whip.
Let us beware of the People, of common-sense, good-nature, inspiration, and evidence.”
― Charles Baudelaire, My Heart Laid Bare

“Conceive a canvas for a lyrical or fairytale buffoonery, for a pantomime, and translate it into a serious novel. Drown everything in an abnormal and dreamy atmosphere, - in the atmosphere of the great days. - It must be something soothing, - even serene in its passion. - Regions of pure Poetry.”
― Charles Baudelaire, My Heart Laid Bare: Intimate diaries with 30 illustrations

“Il n'y a de gouvernement raisonnable et assuré que l'aristocratique.
Monarchie ou république, basées sur la démocratie, sont également absurdes et faibles.
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Il n'existe que trois êtres respectables:
Le prêtre, le guerrier, le poète. Savoir, tuer et créer.
Les autres hommes sont taillables et corvéables, faits pour l'écurie, c'est-à-dire pour exercer ce qu'on appelle des professions.”
― Charles Baudelaire, Mon cœur mis à nu

“The priest is immense because he makes others believe in a heap of weird things. The Church wanting to do everything and be everything: it is a law of human spirit. Peoples adore authority. Priests are the servants and followers of imagination. The throne and the altar: revolutionary maxim.”
― Charles Baudelaire, My Heart Laid Bare: Intimate diaries with 30 illustrations

“Toute forme créée, même par l'homme, est immortelle. Car la forme est indépendante de la matière, et ce ne sont pas les molécules qui constituent la forme.”
― Charles Baudelaire, My Heart Laid Bare

“La Théologie.
Qu'est-ce que la chute ?
Si c'est l'unité devenue dualité, c'est Dieu qui a chuté.
Au moins aurait-il pu deviner dans cette localisation une
malice ou une satire de la providence contre l’amour, et, dans le
mode de la génération, un signe du péché originel. De fait, nous
ne pouvons faire l’amour qu’avec des organes excrémentiels.
En d'autres termes, la création ne serait-elle pas la chute de
Dieu ?”
― Charles Baudelaire, My Heart Laid Bare