Ah, Baudelaire.
“There is an invincible taste for prostitution in the heart of man, from which comes his horror of solitude. He wants to be ‘two’. The man of genius wants to be ‘one’... It is this horror of solitude, the need to lose oneself in the external flesh, that man nobly calls ‘the need to love’.”
“Unable to suppress love, the Church wanted at least to disinfect it, and it created marriage.”
“The more a man cultivates the arts, the less randy he becomes... Only the brute is good at coupling, and copulation is the lyricism of the masses. To copulate is to enter into another–and the artist never emerges from himself.”
“Personally, I think that the unique and supreme delight lies in the certainty of doing ‘evil’–and men and women know from birth that all pleasure lies in evil.”
“There is no form of rational and assured government save an aristocracy. A monarchy or a republic, based upon democracy, are equally absurd and feeble. The immense nausea of advertisements. There are but three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the warrior and the poet. To know, to kill and to create. The rest of mankind may be taxed and drudged, they are born for the stable, that is to say, to practise what they call professions.”
Interesting. I read Baudelaire and Rimbaud and other like toxic crap when I was a teenager, and that plus other influences really helped me into the gutter for a few years. Real gems of wisdom, yeah.
Rimbaud was a bi/homosexual, and I think Baudelaire was too. They and their little coterie were immoral and depraved.
Very telling that you quote Baudelaire as a great savant.