There exist only three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill, to create.

The aphorism reduces “worthy of respect” to three archetypal vocations defined by their ultimate acts: the priest as custodian of knowledge and the sacred (“to know”), the soldier as agent of sanctioned violence (“to kill”), and the poet as maker of new forms and meanings (“to create”). Read this way, Baudelaire is not offering a sociological ranking so much as a stark taxonomy of human powers: cognition, destruction, and creation. The triad also dramatizes modernity’s moral tension—spiritual authority, military force, and artistic imagination competing to define value. The compressed infinitives give the line a brutal clarity, suggesting that society’s deepest reverences attach to those who mediate truth, death, and beauty.