Charles Baudelaire

Nature is a temple in which living columns sometimes emit confused words. Man approaches it through forests of symbols, which observe him with familiar glances.

There is no such thing as a long piece of work, except one that you dare not start.

A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.

As a small child, I felt in my heart two contradictory feelings, the horror of life and the ecstasy of life.

To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.

There is no sweeter pleasure than to surprise a man by giving him more than he hopes for.

This life is a hospital in which every patient is possessed with a desire to change his bed.

Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry.

Progress, this great heresy of decay.

The People adore authority.

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

Modernity signifies the transitory the fugitive the contingent the half of art of which the other half is the eternal and the immutable.

We are weighed down, every moment, by the conception and the sensation of Time. And there are but two means of escaping and forgetting this nightmare: pleasure and work. Pleasure consumes us. Work strengthens us. Let us choose.

I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no Melancholy.

It is time to get drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of Time, get drunk; get drunk without stopping! On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.

Hypocrite reader my fellow my brother!

Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and calculation.

Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet upon the same road, one of them has to give place.

In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men.

A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors.

The unique and supreme voluptuousness of love lies in the certainty of committing evil. And men and women know from birth that in evil is found all sensual delight.

In this horror of solitude, this need to lose his ego in exterior flesh, which man calls grandly the need for love.

It is necessary to work, if not from inclination, at least from despair. Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.

But a dandy can never be a vulgar man.

Even if it were proven that God didn't exist, Religion would still be Saintly and Divine.

The lover of life makes the whole world into his family, just as the lover of the fair sex creates his from all the lovely women he has found, from those that could be found, and those who are impossible to find.

What strange phenomena we find in a great city all we need do is stroll about with our eyes open. Life swarms with innocent monsters.

What is art? Prostitution.

To say the word Romanticism is to say modern art - that is, intimacy, spirituality, color, aspiration towards the infinite, expressed by every means available to the arts.

To be a great man and a saint for oneself, that is the only important thing.

Nothing can be done except little by little.

I have cultivated my hysteria with pleasure and terror.

France is not poetic; she even feels, in fact, a congenital horror of poetry. Among the writers who use verse, those whom she will always prefer are the most prosaic.

There are as many kinds of beauty as there are habitual ways of seeking happiness.

A sweetheart is a bottle of wine, a wife is a wine bottle.

Our religion is itself profoundly sad - a religion of universal anguish, and one which, because of its very catholicity, grants full liberty to the individual and asks no better than to be celebrated in each man's own language - so long as he knows anguish and is a painter.

Everything for me becomes allegory.

One should always be drunk. Thats all that mattersBut with what With wine with poetry or with virtue as you chose. But get drunk.

Nature... is nothing but the inner voice of self-interest.

In literature as in ethics, there is danger, as well as glory, in being subtle. Aristocracy isolates us.

I consider it useless and tedious to represent what exists, because nothing that exists satisfies me. Nature is ugly, and I prefer the monsters of my fancy to what is positively trivial.

God is the only being who, in order to reign, doesn't even need to exist.

Evil is done without effort, naturally, it is the working of fate; good is always the product of an art.

It would be difficult for me not to conclude that the most perfect type of masculine beauty is Satan, as portrayed by Milton.

We are all born marked for evil.

What is exhilarating in bad taste is the aristocratic pleasure of giving offense.

To the solemn graves, near a lonely cemetery, my heart like a muffled drum is beating funeral marches.

Let us beware of common folk, of common sense, of sentiment, of inspiration, and of the obvious.

Those men get along best with women who can get along best without them.

The man who says his evening prayer is a captain posting his sentinels. He can sleep.

The beautiful is always bizarre.

Sexuality is the lyricism of the masses.

Any man who does not accept the conditions of life sells his soul.

There is no dream of love, however ideal it may be, which does not end up with a fat, greedy baby hanging from the breast.

Whether you come from heaven or hell, what does it matter, O Beauty!

Modernity is the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, which make up one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immutable. This transitory fugitive element, which is constantly changing, must not be despised or neglected.

Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.

If the poet has pursued a moral objective, he has diminished his poetic force.

The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be himself and others, as he wishes.

Anybody, providing he knows how to be amusing, has the right to talk about himself.

Even in the centuries which appear to us to be the most monstrous and foolish, the immortal appetite for beauty has always found satisfaction.

There are moments of existence when time and space are more profound, and the awareness of existence is immensely heightened.

An artist is an artist only because of his exquisite sense of beauty, a sense which shows him intoxicating pleasures, but which at the same time implies and contains an equally exquisite sense of all deformities and all disproportion.

What is irritating about love is that it is a crime that requires an accomplice.

Beauty is the sole ambition, the exclusive goal of Taste.

A sweetheart is a bottle of wine a wife is a wine bottle.

Color... thinks by itself independently of the object it clothes.

It is the hour to be drunken! to escape being the martyred slaves of time, be ceaselessly drunk. On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.

The Devil pulls the strings which make us dance; We find delight in the most loathsome things; Some furtherance of Hell each new day brings, And yet we feel no horror in that rank advance.

It would perhaps be nice to be alternately the victim and the executioner.

Common sense tells us that the things of the earth exist only a little, and that true reality is only in dreams.

Always be a poet, even in prose.

Nature is a temple in which living columns sometimes emit confused words. Man approaches it through forests of symbols which observe him with familiar glances.

Evil is committed without effort, naturally, fatally; goodness is always the product of some art.

Who would dare assign to art the sterile function of imitating nature?

The world only goes round by misunderstanding.

Being a useful man has always seemed to me to be something truly hideous.

Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony.

It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.

A multitude of small delights constitute happiness.

All which is beautiful and noble is the result of reason and calculation.

What strange phenomena we find in a great city, all we need do is stroll about with our eyes open. Life swarms with innocent monsters.

The life of our city is rich in poetic and marvelous subjects. We are enveloped and steeped as though in an atmosphere of the marvelous; but we do not notice it.

There is no more steely barb than that of the Infinite.

Nearly all our originality comes from the stamp that time impresses upon our sensibility.

Dancing can reveal all the mystery that music conceals.

How little remains of the man I once was, save the memory of him! But remembering is only a new form of suffering.

For the merchant, even honesty is a financial speculation.

It is by universal misunderstanding that all agree. For if, by ill luck, people understood each other, they would never agree.

Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.

I have more memories than if I were a thousand years old.

Genius is childhood recalled at will.

For me, Romanticism is the most recent and the most current expression of beauty.

Music fathoms the sky.

Nothing in a portrait is a matter of indifference. Gesture, grimace, clothing, decor even - all must combine to realize a character.

Modernity signifies the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art of which the other half is the eternal and the immutable.

The dance can reveal everything mysterious that is hidden in music, and it has the additional merit of being human and palpable. Dancing is poetry with arms and legs.

Inspiration comes of working every day.

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

The immense appetite we have for biography comes from a deep seated sense of equality.