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Genius is nothing but youth recaptured at will.

— Charles Baudelaire

Le génie n'est que l'enfance retrouvée à volonté.

Original text (French)

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Notes from Wikiquote

Le peintre de la vie moderne (1863), III: “L’artiste, homme du monde, homme des foules et enfant”

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Intelligence

More quotes by Charles Baudelaire

I think there can be few examples of a life as dilapidated as mine.

Les fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil) (1857)

There is in the word, in the logos, something sacred which forbids us to gamble with it. To handle a language skilfuly is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.

L'art romantique (1869)

This life is a hospital where each patient is possessed by the desire to change his bed.

Le Spleen de Paris (1862)

Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject nor exact truth, but in the way of feeling.

We have psychologized like the insane, who aggravate their madness in struggling to understand it.

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Most intellectual people do not believe in God, but they fear him just the same.

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Innocence in genius, and candor in power, are both noble qualities.

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Like every 'intellectual', a philosophy teacher is a petty bourgeois. When he opens his mouth, it is petty-bourgeois ideology that speaks: its resources and ruses are infinite.

Louis Althusser Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (1968)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Charles Baudelaire (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.