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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.

Charles Baudelaire
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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.
Charles Baudelaire
There is no such thing as a long piece of work, except one that you dare not start.
Charles Baudelaire
A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.
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
To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.
Charles Baudelaire
This life is a hospital in which every patient is possessed with a desire to change his bed.
Charles Baudelaire
Any healthy man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry.
Charles Baudelaire
Progress, this great heresy of decay.
Charles Baudelaire
There exist only three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the soldier, the poet. To know, to kill, to create.
Charles Baudelaire
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.
Charles Baudelaire
I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no Melancholy.
Charles Baudelaire
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.
Charles Baudelaire
Hypocrite reader my fellow my brother!
Charles Baudelaire
Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and calculation.
Charles Baudelaire
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.
Charles Baudelaire
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.
Charles Baudelaire
A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors.
Charles Baudelaire
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.
Charles Baudelaire
It is necessary to work, if not from inclination, at least from despair. Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.
Charles Baudelaire
Even if it were proven that God didn't exist, Religion would still be Saintly and Divine.
Charles Baudelaire
But a dandy can never be a vulgar man.
Charles Baudelaire
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.
Charles Baudelaire
What is art? Prostitution.
Charles Baudelaire
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.
Charles Baudelaire
To be a great man and a saint for oneself, that is the only important thing.
Charles Baudelaire
Nothing can be done except little by little.
Charles Baudelaire
I have cultivated my hysteria with pleasure and terror.
Charles Baudelaire
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.
Charles Baudelaire
There are as many kinds of beauty as there are habitual ways of seeking happiness.
Charles Baudelaire
A sweetheart is a bottle of wine, a wife is a wine bottle.
Charles Baudelaire
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.
Charles Baudelaire
Everything for me becomes allegory.
Charles Baudelaire
In literature as in ethics, there is danger, as well as glory, in being subtle. Aristocracy isolates us.
Charles Baudelaire
Nature... is nothing but the inner voice of self-interest.
Charles Baudelaire
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.
Charles Baudelaire
God is the only being who, in order to reign, doesn't even need to exist.
Charles Baudelaire
It would be difficult for me not to conclude that the most perfect type of masculine beauty is Satan, as portrayed by Milton.
Charles Baudelaire
Evil is done without effort, naturally, it is the working of fate; good is always the product of an art.
Charles Baudelaire
We are all born marked for evil.
Charles Baudelaire
What is exhilarating in bad taste is the aristocratic pleasure of giving offense.
Charles Baudelaire
To the solemn graves, near a lonely cemetery, my heart like a muffled drum is beating funeral marches.
Charles Baudelaire
Let us beware of common folk, of common sense, of sentiment, of inspiration, and of the obvious.
Charles Baudelaire
Those men get along best with women who can get along best without them.
Charles Baudelaire
The man who says his evening prayer is a captain posting his sentinels. He can sleep.
Charles Baudelaire
Sexuality is the lyricism of the masses.
Charles Baudelaire
Any man who does not accept the conditions of life sells his soul.
Charles Baudelaire
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.
Charles Baudelaire
Whether you come from heaven or hell, what does it matter, O Beauty!
Charles Baudelaire