All fashions are charming, or rather relatively charming, each one being a new striving, more or less well conceived, after beauty, an approximate statement of an ideal, the desire for which constantly teases the unsatisfied human mind.
Charles BaudelaireIt is by universal misunderstanding that all agree. For if, by ill luck, people understood each other, they would never agree.
Charles BaudelaireWhat could be more simple and more complex, more obvious and more profound than a portrait.
Charles BaudelaireWho among us has not, in moments of ambition, dreamt of the miracle of a form of poetic prose, musical but without rhythm and rhyme, both supple and staccato enough to adapt itself to the lyrical movements of our souls, the undulating movements of our reveries, and the convulsive movements of our consciences? This obsessive ideal springs above all from frequent contact with enormous cities, from the junction of their innumerable connections.
Charles Baudelaire