Tom > Tom's Quotes

“One should always be drunk. That's all that matters...But with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you chose. But get drunk.”
― Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen

“Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recaptured at will.”
― Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays

“La plus belle des ruses du diable est de vous persuader qu'il n'existe pas."

("The devil's finest trick is to persuade you that he does not exist.")”
― Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen

“Remembering is only a new form of suffering.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“Strangeness is a necessary ingredient in beauty.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“There are women who inspire you with the desire to conquer them and to take your pleasure of them; but this one fills you only with the desire to die slowly beneath her gaze.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“Life has but one true charm: the charm of the game. But what if we’re indifferent to whether we win or lose?”
― Charles Baudelaire

“Extract the eternal from the ephemeral.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“What can an eternity of damnation matter to someone who has felt, if only for a second, the infinity of delight?”
― Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen

“I am unable to understand how a man of honor could take a newspaper in his hands without a shudder of disgust.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“Even when she walks one would believe that she dances.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“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

“I set out to discover the why of it, and to transform my pleasure into knowledge.”
― Charles Baudelaire

“Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man's physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed.”
― Charles Baudelaire, BAUDELAIRE - the Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays

“I believe I am in Hell, therefore I am.”
― Arthur Rimbaud

“True alchemy lies in this formula: ‘Your memory and your senses are but the nourishment of your creative impulse’.”
― Arthur Rimbaud, Illuminations

“A thousand Dreams within me softly burn:
From time to time my heart is like some oak
Whose blood runs golden where a branch is torn.”
― Arthur Rimbaud, Complete Works

“I is another.”
― Arthur Rimbaud

“But I've just noticed that my mind is asleep.”
― Arthur Rimbaud, Une Saison en Enfer / Vers Nouveaux

“Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead to share with the worms that gather in the darkness and surround the world with the power of their lives while from the dimlit halls of other places forms that never were and never could be writhe for the impatience of the few who never saw what could have been. In the black water with the sun shining at midnight, those fruit shall come ripe and in the darkness of that which is golden shall split open to reveal the revelation of the fatal softness in the earth. The shadows of the abyss are like the petals of a monstrous flower that shall blossom within the skull and expand the mind beyond what any man can bear, but whether it decays under the earth or above on green fields, or out to sea or in the very air, all shall come to revelation, and to revel, in the knowledge of the strangling fruit—and the hand of the sinner shall rejoice, for there is no sin in shadow or in light that the seeds of the dead cannot forgive. And there shall be in the planting in the shadows a grace and a mercy from which shall blossom dark flowers, and their teeth shall devour and sustain and herald the passing of an age. That which dies shall still know life in death for all that decays is not forgotten and reanimated it shall walk the world in the bliss of not-knowing. And then there shall be a fire that knows the naming of you, and in the presence of the strangling fruit, its dark flame shall acquire every part of you that remains.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“some questions will ruin you if you are denied the answer long enough.”
― Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation

“Humanity does not ask us to be happy. It merely asks us to be brilliant on its behalf.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game

“I've lived too long with pain. I won't know who I am without it.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game

“Human beings are free except when humanity needs them. Maybe humanity needs you. To do something. Maybe humanity needs me—to find out what you're good for. We might both do despicable things, Ender, but if humankind survives, then we were good tools.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game